The Problem with “More”
The Problem with “More”
Our globalized world lures us to crave more. The culture of “more” is a culture of not enough, accumulation and conquest, and sought but constantly deferred satiety. Every time we text message or update Instagram, researchers tell us that our brains loop in a dopamine cycle of neurological yearning.
We seem unable to discern when enough really is enough—and especially so in the Global North. From shopping to Netflix binge-watching, sexual hook-up culture to alcoholism, to the reckless gambling of Wall Street speculators, we are in thrall to both trivial and life-threatening addictions. Intervention in desire’s consumptive assault is written off as bad economics or puritanical repression.
The very fear of limiting desire reveals how out of control desire is, and how, in fact, our excess longing imperils the planet. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated consistently for nearly three decades that human activities increase greenhouse gas emissions. Our crisis moment, however, finds Americans regressively debating whether climate change is a hoax while oil companies scour and drill Earth for more “exploration and production.”
I am, of course, personally implicated in “more,” a disease that Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss memorably called Affluenza in their book of the same name: When Too Much is Never Enough. I live in the United States, the great purveyor of the myth of more. My family and I are tucked away in a beautiful rural corner of Massachusetts, but even in the country I nevertheless internalize lies. These lies I tell myself, inculcated in the culture of more, range from the substantial to the mundane: If I work harder as a church pastor, my church will be more successful and more people will come. If more people like me, I’ll be content. If I purchase more books, I’ll acquire more knowledge and maybe even wisdom. If I drink another beer, I’ll feel more relaxed.
The desire for more, though, is ultimately a crisis of desire. What is it that we desire when we desire more? It’s usually not the thing itself. The thing itself, whether a lover, job position, third-quarter earnings goal, or new style of jeans, remarkably fades away in desire’s fickle dissatisfaction. But seekers on transformation’s path have known for millennia that desire’s incompletion points inexorably to spirituality. As writer Ronald Rolheiser puts it, “There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace…Spirituality is ultimately what we do with that desire.”
The Spanish Carmelite mystic John of the Cross is a spiritual director for our obsessive age of “more.” He is justly famous for his concept of the “dark night of the soul”—those periods of faith in which our certainties, hopes for the future, beliefs about God, and even faith itself are eclipsed. But he also wrote about another dark, albeit less popular, night: the dark night of sense.
The dark night of sense precedes the dark night of the soul in that it harnesses our desire and prepares our will to be ready to receive, meet, and fall in love with God. There is no union with God, John says, without first curbing our appetites. No love without first setting limits. John poetically affirms that the goal of the spiritual life is love-drenched union with God, but today he might clarify that union doesn’t happen first in yoga class, on a beach at sunset, or hands raised in a particularly affecting religious service. According to John of the Cross, union is instead (and unfortunately) the fruit of long, dark nights. Union is a gift after the excruciating process of detaching our desires from all that is not God.
John’s book, The Ascent to Mount Carmel, does not fly off many bookstore shelves. And I get it. The book maintains a rigorous methodological style and insists on the torture-sounding process called mortification. This word “mortification” is one of those crusty, cringe-inducing words from mystical tradition that contains spiritual power but is widely misunderstood. And, since the word is widely misunderstood, it is hardly used at all. Mortification, in theory, might sound like punishment in an imperialist black site prison, but mortification in practice looks surprisingly like liberation.
Mortification is not—much as the word’s sound might suggest—medieval or modern self-flagellation. But it is connected, etymologically, and spiritually to death. John writes, “The mortification of the appetites can be called a night for the soul. [Because] to deprive oneself of the gratification of the appetites in all things is like living in darkness.” John is describing the often-painful process of letting go of the ultimacy that our appetites ascribe to non-ultimate people, places, emotions, substances, and things. Spiritual transformation leads through darkness because the process of limiting desires feels like death. Just ask any serious caffeine addict who tried to give up coffee. Or, better yet, talk to a person in recovery.
Anyone who is paying attention to global crises, however, knows that in fact, the opposite is true. It’s not limited (mortified) but unchecked desire that leads to death. Death is on prime-time display in the form of irreversible climate change, deforestation, vast inequality between rich and poor, Global North obesity vis-à-vis Global South food insecurity, devaluing and over-sexualization of women’s bodies, piling up trash in landfills and oceans, species extinction, and more.
There must be a point at which we say, “Enough.”
To suggest that appetites are somehow at the root of our problems and must be restrained is not a popular message and is easily misunderstood. To stereotype to make a point: liberals fear limiting desire because their sense of freedom is tied up in individual autonomy; conservatives more easily set boundaries around desire but usually at the cost of valuing bodies, sexuality, and desire.
According to John of the Cross, however, bodies and desires are not the primary cause of suffering. It is critically important to say—in the context of a Christianity that has ignored, demeaned, and often abused bodies—that bodies are beautiful, sexuality is wonderful, and desire itself is holy!
Rather, our wills are the problem. Here’s how John puts it: “The less strongly the will is fixed on God, and the more dependent it is on creatures, the more…the passions [inordinate desires] combat the soul and reign in it.” Our wills attach to the objects of our appetites, and we invest them with meaning and purpose rather than God. This is a basic enough movement of the heart, but it leads to spiritual disaster.
To give a trite example: I’m a compulsive email-checker. I intend, without success, to create boundaries around my phone. On any given day and in spite of spiritual practice, my center of emotional gravity is inevitably thrown off. I realize—usually after the fact—that my phone has become an extension of my hand and consciousness.
For what am I hoping? Sometimes it’s for someone to write me back and sometimes it is an ambiguous, object-less sense of unease. I don’t know what I’m hoping for in that moment, but I pull out my phone to provide a fleeting respite of relief from vague, ill-defined discomfort.
Mystics and theologians from Augustine to John of the Cross call this dissatisfaction “inordinate desire.” This is the type of yearning within us that aches for union with the infinite but settles instead for the finite and thus perpetually lets us down. Sometimes it’s as simple as the vague anxiety after checking email. Sometimes it’s bland ennui or soul-numbing depression. Sometimes, more catastrophically, our collective desires crash via social systems such as the unjust excesses of corporate capitalism. When the desires of whole cultures and people groups run amok, as many have, it instigates widespread crisis.
In the letter to the Ephesians, located in the New Testament, the author attunes acutely to the struggle of desire. One Greek word he uses captures desire’s storms. The word is epithumia and is translated as lust or passion (2:3). It is what Gordon Gecko embodies in the movie Wall Street in which he quips, “Greed is good.” Or, more profoundly, it is what Augustine of Hippo has in mind when he writes, “That reign of desires savagely tyrannizes and batters a person’s whole life and mind with storms raging in all directions.” Epithumia today stirs up such storms, both personally and politically. It leads to personal unhappiness and broken relationships, but it is also the unaccountable desire to reap profit at the expense of the poor and the planet.
To heal unaccountable desire, though, requires contemplative soul work. We find healing not in libertinism or repression but in locating human desire within a larger economy of divine desire. Much of the work of Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley locates itself at this very intersection of contemplation and desire. Commenting on sexuality and gender battles in the church, she writes, “The current crisis is about the failure, in this Web-induced culture of instantly commodified desire, to submit all of our desires to the test of divine longing.”
The biblical writers have always said the same: “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Ephesians chapter two does not end with Gordon Gecko or the Mall of America but in God’s love for us: “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us…made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved” (2:4-5).
All these examples point to desire of a different order: it’s not excessive desire that leads to death; it’s divine desire that leads to love. There is Presence within the universe, a Christian faith affirms, that moves towards us with love. This presence of love is fierce, however, because for those who are willing, it contains the transformational capacity to disrupt and realign our desires. The process is mortifying, a true dark night of sense, but worth the wait. Rightly ordered desire frees us to live lives that embody the wholeness for which our world groans, lives centered on mercy, peace, and compassion rather than destructive, epithumia-emboldened consumption.
This is why a renewed asceticism is needed so desperately today. We surely don’t need asceticism that scorns the body or shames sexual desire. Christianity has left far too many wounded casualties in its path. Rather, we need an asceticism that affirms bodies and selves, but nevertheless purifies the will so that our desires align with God’s desires. We’ll never be satisfied with gadgets, accolades, and more stuff, but the alignment of human desire with divine desire is the goal of our longing. As one of my teachers, James Finley, says, “We are made in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with Infinite Love will do.”
Infinite Love is the intervention to the greed-fueled, desire-addled world in which we find ourselves. Wholeness and union follow the dark night.
The Deschooling Dialogues | Ayahuasca and Other Pathways of Perception
The Deschooling Dialogues | Ayahuasca and Other Pathways of Perception
This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on August 10, 2018, for Kosmos Journal. We have engaged in a non-linear discussion about the nature of consumption and its relationship to consciousness, and explored the role of contemplative practices, psychedelics, entheogens, and plant medicines in our individual and collective transitions.
This conversation was facilitated by Alnoor Ladha as part of an interview series titled, The Deschooling Dialogues: Wisdom from the Front Lines of the Battle Against the Colonized Mind. Rhonda Fabian is the editor of Kosmos Journal and Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism; 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl; and most recently, How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation.
Alnoor | Thank you Rhonda and Kosmos for initiating this conversation and hosting us energetically, spiritually, and virtually. And thanks to Daniel for being here. I have the great pleasure of knowing both of you from separate walks of life. Let’s start with How Soon Is Now? What was your motivation for writing the book, Daniel, and what is your diagnosis of what’s happening in the world?
Daniel | In a way, my whole trajectory that started in my late 20s really began with this uneasy awareness of this ecological crisis that we’re facing—or more accurately, not facing. In a way, this led me to seek higher awareness through psychedelics, almost as a path back to reconnecting with something, with the planet itself, with some kind of greater meaning.
My first book, Breaking Open the Head, is about psychedelic shamanism. I started as a secular materialist, but ended up having these different experiences that shifted my worldview to a more Jungian, shamanic, mystical perspective. That then led me to the second book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which was looks at the prophecies of various I\indigenous cultures around the world, like the Maya and the Hopi, as well as the Yuga cycle of Hinduism, and the Western tradition of the Apocalypse in Judeo-Christianity and Islam.
It’s easy to talk about the “Age of Aquarius” or “the dawning of a new consciousness,” but I became more interested in what this means materially and pragmatically. Partially, I really was inspired by the phenomenological idea that the tool shapes the tool user, so consciousness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s basically something that’s forming and developing and extending and retracting all the time, depending on the social constructs and the physical environment and the technical tools.
I then began to think about the ecological crisis as a crisis in global consciousness and something that would potentially reshape the drivers of our consciousness. It seems as though we are exiting this brief interregnum of bourgeois society that has provided a certain type of comfort and longevity and stability for a small portion of humanity.
Our future existence, even looking 20, 30, 50 years down the line, when we take in what we’re learning about accelerated climate change, how a whole planetary ecosystem can flip, how you can have a 10 degree Celsius warming in a decade or two if key feedback loops get engaged—and it feels like there’s everything pointing towards that—leads you to think, “Okay, I’m going to surrender to collapse and just enjoy the time that’s left.” Or you could say, “Well, we’re very creative and innovative as a species. We can use our genius and technical intelligence to at least make an effort to forestall what would otherwise be a complete collapse, not just of civilization but of the biosphere’s ability to support complex life.”
How Soon Is Now was a ten-year effort of trial and error, and really a transformative experience for me, first to hold the disparate data around what is happening ecologically and then trying to formulate a coherent potential systemic response.
I think it was a traumatizing experience, personally, to really internalize what’s happening to our planet, and then try to make shape out of it. And so the book looks at the types of changes we need to make in three areas—technically, socially, and then in terms of consciousness, which includes our education systems, our culture, and our media, which create values, beliefs, which lead to patterns of behavior, daily habits, and practices.
To me, it’s clearly real that we’re in this kind of prophetic unfolding, and from the various esoteric traditions I’ve explored, and in my own deepest intuitions, I think it leads to something else, some evolutionary leap in consciousness. Whether that means that humans keep existing in these types of physical bodies or whether it’s some other type of spiritualized existence, I don’t know.
Alnoor | Can you say more about this potential leap? I’m not asking for a scientific proposition, rather your instinctual feeling of what could be.
Daniel | Since I started this whole journey and explored substances like dimethyltryptamine (DMT)—in particular Ayahuasca and LSD—it’s felt to me that there is the potential that we, in this lifetime, can somehow make a kind of quantum, mutational leap into another dimensional realization. Many thinkers and visionaries have tried to explain this in different language formulations. For example, within William Blake’s ideas about activating the imagination to awaken within the dream, we recognize that what we’re experiencing is not some ‘objective reality,’ but, rather, some kind of lucid dream that consciousness is co-creating through our vessels.
I think part of the fun, in a strange way, if you’re someone who thinks along these lines, is that there’s a kind of ineffable mystery underpinning these ideas, and it would not be as good of a game if we could predict or understand what the outcome is going to be.
Alnoor | Yes, the prophetic imagination gets activated in this line of thought. I would love to hear Rhonda’s take on this idea of a ‘quantum leap.’ And, of course, none of us are soothsayers, but there is a sort of arrow to this directionality, and there is the felt experience of what is happening. On one side of the continuum, those who are willing to feel the living planet are becoming aware of the deep grief and despair of what’s happening and the effects of the Anthropocene. On the other side, there’s this sense of liberation because we cannot continue with the Dark Age, the Kali Yuga. Rhonda, what is your perspective on what is happening and what could be?
Rhonda | I think those are good questions for our time, and I really appreciate Daniel going deeper into this idea of an evolutionary leap or a quantum mutation.
I do feel more people are coming forward and sharing experiences of waking up—whether from the realities of our toxic financial system or the shortcomings of material rationalism—to something they feel is much greater than themselves. This awakening is what’s needed now. If we didn’t need it, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in. In other words, if the old story was serving us—the old story of greed and competition—then we wouldn’t need this new story of waking up, this new spirituality.
I believe a quantum mutation or shift can happen very quickly, in the blink of an eye as the esotericists say—Steiner, the Theosophists, Bailey, and so on, and as many indigenous cultures say as well. There are some who think we need some sort of paranormal or mystical experience in order to prove that ‘something greater’ is out there. For me, it is enough to walk in a forest in the darkness and directly experience the sentient nature of trees, the shapeless Life force all around me. This is an experience of awakening for me to what is real.
The Buddha advises us to recognize the four nutriments that feed our suffering and to stop ingesting them. We start with the most basic, which are edible foods; next are sensory impressions; then our volition or desires; and finally, we see consciousness itself as a nutriment.
Buddha describes volition as the things that we chase after, the things we desire. I think that to experience human life fully, we all want to connect with our desire to realize something larger than ourselves. That can be a great motivator on the one hand—to serve—but, at the same time, we can get trapped by our desires, on the physical plane and even the spiritual.
What we ‘chase’ has a lot to do with our strongest views. We need to detach from certain dogmas or strong views like ‘science will save us’ or the view that ‘all is lost.’ Instead, we have to take a sober look at what is true and at the same time recognize we’re in the process of evolution itself; it’s happening with us and through us and there is much we can’t ‘know.’ The living universe is emergent and purposeful. Realizing this, we can work with increasing fearlessness and joy for the new story that’s bound to come.
So, I feel the times are very serious, but I take every ‘certainty’ with a grain of salt, knowing that we all have agendas. I have to tap into what is true for me. And the more closely I tune into Nature, the surer I become of what is real, and the more able I am to take that energy into service for others.
Alnoor | Indeed. All three of us seem to be Krishnamurti-ites, in the sense that we believe truth is a pathless land. And although I recognize that the transcendental experience that can happen in merging with Nature, I also tend to believe that the veils of modernity and its concomitant programming are so strong that the role of sacraments is a powerful key—our symbiotic relationship with plants is critical to the awakening we find ourselves in. I recognize this is my personal bias. It’s one path. In some ways, I see the plant teachers and the medicines as the inoculations against modernity.
Daniel, what’s your perspective on the role of psychedelics in this shift in consciousness and in our ability to cope with climate change? I recognize there’s a school of thought that believes that working with plant medicines like Ayahuasca, for example, can make you less effective in some ways because you’re in the acceptance of what is, as opposed to activating your activist spirit or your sense of a more integral yoga.
Daniel | Well, evidentially and anecdotally, it seems to me that many people experienced their initial profound awakenings through psychoactive compounds found in Nature. For instance, being aware that your culture has actually programmed you for a certain type of subjectivity with certain wants and ideas about itself. That’s something that many people only initially access through psychedelics. It could also happen through meditation, but it tends to happen slower.
I’ve also seen many people undergo a profound enough shift, particularly through Ayahuasca, that they actually change their lives. If they’re wealthy or if they’re entrepreneurs, they change how they’re thinking about their wealth or their capacity to create enterprises and so on, and tend to move toward more holistic enterprises that are less destructive and more helpful.
But of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Some people are very good at keeping the false separation between who they are as a wealth holder or entrepreneur and who they are as a psychonaut. And then there’s the potential shadow side of psychedelics which can contribute to negative traits. They’re very powerful tools. Contemporary society is still learning how to use them properly, and there’s a lot of trial and error happening. I have found in my own life that I used to love certain compounds like LSD, and then they just began to have a tremendously negative impact on my life. They were magnifying more of the Jungian shadow sides of my psyche.
So, I had to basically step back from it, which was difficult because in a way I loved the glamour of the experience and had gained so much from it. Really, it’s incredible to take substances which are able to change your space-time perception to such an incredible degree. It gives you a different perception of the nature of reality.
Even beyond LSD, I took a step back from all of it for a little while just because I wanted to feel that I was re-grounded in the stable, normal, everyday consciousness and the ability to experience the very real psychedelic state within that. But I look forward to having a deeper re-engagement at some point, particularly with Ayahuasca.
We have no idea what a group of contemporary, self-discovering people who collectively work with a sacrament like Ayahuasca can do, especially if they transcend the traditional dogma or lineage associations. They will be able to create new lineages or new approaches to these tools fit for our times. These experiments could amplify our psychic capacities, our intuition, our telepathy, our visionary capacities, maybe even our capacity to shape or co-create the nature of reality itself.
Rhonda | Although I haven’t experienced the Ayahuasca ceremony myself, some of my close friends have and came back profoundly changed, so I can relate to what Daniel’s saying in that regard. It raises questions about the nature of reality itself. In the shamanic trance, for instance, there’s the idea of touching a parallel world, a world that sits beside or on top of this one—what some have maybe called the astral plane. What are the implications or consequences of accessing this numinous space?
In a number of traditions, there’s this idea that just above this level of reality is a realm of hungry ghosts or spirits and that a lot of the psychic noise going on around us is actually happening on this plane where there’s trapped energy and a lot of negative stuff happening. From personal experience, it seems possible to access certain aspects of this plane, whether through drugs or other means. This is what I was referring to in regards to consciousness as a nutriment. We may be tapping into certain energies that are not healthy for us to tap into. On the other hand, when these altered states result in opening a door to liberation, to really having for the first time in your life a sense of unity or oneness, or seeing that there’s a unified field and so on, I think it can be very valuable.
Daniel | I think that there probably are these many levels of subtle reality. There may be many, maybe infinite—who knows—of these alternative realms. And yes, that’s what shamanism is. You go and you have guides, you have experiences with battling certain types of entities or protecting people from them or purging them out of people and so on, so it’s a very active engagement with these subtle realms. Whereas there are certain forms of Buddhism and other religions which are not really interested as much in the subtle realms. So it’s partly a temperamental thing, in a way, or psychological dispensation, if you will.
I recently went to a gathering in England at the Tyringham Initiative. They have been convening researchers and scientists with serious establishment credibility. In the last meeting they were talking about how—according to certain interpretations of string theory—there are ten dimensions of space-time. There’s the four that we currently experience, and there’s another six beyond those, and they’re actually tiny, nested dimensions within this one.
Some of these scientists were very open to the possibility that psychedelics are actually tools that allow us to perceive and interact with these other dimensions of space-time, which really excited me because I do think that, ultimately, there will be a way that we can start to understand consciousness through the psychedelic experience. Of course, there are the limitations of language and science itself, which is also simply one language, one approach, to reality.
If we take this model of the ten dimensions, the ultimate dimension—or let’s say the underlying or tenth dimension—would be the loom of the vibrating superstrings that vibrate in all ten dimensions at once, and everything else that we perceive as different types of space and time is built upon this fabric of reality. Perhaps what we talk about as nirvana or the void is actually our dissolution into that tenth dimensional, spaceless and timeless, realm.
This is the experience most seekers seek, whether it’s through meditation or other ways. There’s one psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT, which specifically creates this experience in just 10 to 20 minutes. You have a sense of total ego dissolution into a state of non-duality, and you enter this infinite realm of crystalline, mandala-like, never-ending bliss going off in all directions, forever, with no ‘you’ there to perceive it.
To me, that is experiential confirmation of the void or nirvana as Buddhism talks about. But it can also be referenced through a scientific approach that is starting to understand that there may be an underlying tenth dimension which is outside the ground of space and time, a dimension that is accessible, atemporal, and aspatial, and perhaps everything that we experience in space-time reality is built on top of it. I find that very, very exciting to really begin to get a multilayered map that integrates esotericism and a kind of truly comprehensive scientific perspective.
Alnoor | Perhaps we don’t need scientific validation at all. Perhaps chasing the alibi for the rational mind is part of the problem?
Maybe there are ten dimensions, or that’s as far as our limited minds can comprehend. Maybe there are infinite realms of reality that exist co-tangentially to the present moment. However, my subjective experience has been that there is something about the human merger with psychedelic sacraments that allows one to access these higher realms. It’s almost impossible to not feel the higher intelligence at work with these substances, especially when you’re working with a deity as powerful as Ayahuasca. This is, of course, completely subjective and ‘non-scientific,’ and I say that as a form of high compliment, to both those who are willing to transcend the limitations of the rational mind, and as an homage to the plant’s consciousness, which I know to be simultaneously so much greater than, and part of, our own consciousness.
When I commune with Ayahuasca, I see it as a merger with the Gaian entelechy. I feel Mother Earth’s spirit guiding me and holding me through the experience. Even the shadow aspects and the opening of the ‘realm of the hungry ghosts,’ as Rhonda said, is really to show you your own hungry ghost. The shining of the light on these aspects of our repressed psyche is what releases the trauma rather than the thing we should fear. In a psychedelic experience, the shift can happen in both the most difficult and the most blissful experience.
What really matters with the medicine work is the intention that you bring and the reverence and humility you offer to the plants. In essence, the manner by which you proceed is directly correlated with the experience you have. I find what often happens, especially in the West, is that we come to Ayahuasca ceremonies or LSD experiences or whatever with this consumptive mindset. “What can I get out of it?” “This is what I want healed!” We do the same with yoga and meditation and indigenous knowledge. The consumption of the esoteric and the mystical is found everywhere. I think when you come to a ceremony or any sort of initiatory process with the lens of self-gain, then you may not necessarily have the tools and be prepared for the doors and portals that could be open to you.
Perhaps this is where some of the negative effects of psychedelic experiences come from—when we come with ill intention or no intention, or simply come at the experience with the unchecked conditioning of modernity. One could argue that the dominant characteristic of modernity is this wetiko, cannibalistic, consumptive logic that we’ve been socialized into in every aspect of our lives. It is the dominant moral philosophy of modernity and is clearly articulated in the notion of the invisible hand of the market economy. We are told, and most of us blindly believe, that if you pursue your selfishness, your interests, and your needs, somehow, miraculously, a market equilibrium will be created that benefits us all.
Let us go into the deep cultural notions that are at the root of modernity, specifically consumption. Rhonda, what is your assessment of the role of wetiko, cannibalism, and consumption in what’s happening right now, and importantly, what can we do about it?
Rhonda | The toxic effects of our cultural mindset are the very root of many of our present-day crises. Focusing on consumption through a cultural lens is an interesting way to look at our present times. We have a society that poisons our children with extreme violence, misogyny, and hatred through persistent advertising, Hollywood propaganda, and the gaming industry.
We’re chasing the very things that are destroying us. It’s dumbfounding. It’s partly why I feel that to live today is to live with one foot in the current ‘historic’ dimension, and the other foot in the Ultimate, in the numinous. There may be innumerable worlds, as you say, but I still have to get up in the morning and make breakfast, you know? So, one foot must be firmly planted in the realm of ‘reality’ and the work I do here. And the other foot is in the Ultimate dimension, recognizing that these glimpses of bliss realms are also reality. It’s not a separate reality, however. For me, it’s simply what is.
If I have to be a consumer—we all do—I want to be as mindful a consumer as I can be, staying cognizant of the four nutriments. And to work helping usher in this new age of light, which I truly feel we are on the very precipice of achieving.
Daniel | I agree that that’s the situation. The question of what to do about it seems to be next. I think that there is the potential, the same way that advertising and marketing people engineer destructive consumption habits, to use the tools of media, art, creativity, etc. to construct a different social model and then build a movement around it.
That’s what I was trying to do with Evolver, this idea that you could take a word like “evolver” and make it into something really cool. Who doesn’t want to be an evolver? What does it mean to be an evolver? Well, it means you’re shifting from McDonald’s to permaculture, to organic food. You’re shifting from drugs of abuse to exploring consciousness through sacred plants. You’re shifting from casual hookups to tantric explorations, and so on. I use those examples because sex, drugs, and rock & roll are ways that our society has taken our natural vitalizing impulses and degraded them and turned them into addictive and consumptive patterns.
Rhonda | We can also look at the potential power of religious and spiritual organizations. If there could be an awakening and coming together of spiritual leaders around the world, if these institutions could be somehow renewed or retooled to actually meet the needs of our time, I think that’s hopeful. Because worship is also a vitalizing impulse and churches, temples, and monasteries are existing infrastructure. The Internet, as well, is a massively powerful entity and infrastructure. Yet these possible sources of hope are being subverted even as they are lifted up as beacons.
Alnoor | I think its important to presence the obstacle inherent here; namely, these institutions or even technology itself, are subsets of neoliberalism and of the logic of the existing system. The system itself is a complex, adaptive, evolutionary system. We’re waiting for singularity, but singularity is already here in some ways. The market economy is the greatest artificial intelligence man has ever created.
The market economy is a Frankensteinian proposition, and it will co-opt any form of dissent. There is no merit system as we’re told. The system rewards those who best serve its logic and raises them to the top. What’s its logic? It’s short-termist, it’s greedy, it’s extractionist, it’s life destroying. And unless we change the very logic of that system, the culture of that system, I’m more skeptical that we can actually use the master’s tools, in that sense.
Daniel | I’m trying to unpack a little bit of what you’re saying there. The issue I have with your perspective is it feels to me it’s coming from a dualistic perspective rather than a permaculture perspective.
A permaculture perspective is that everything is potentially compost; it can be repurposed. I’m really interested in this idea of social permaculture and therefore everything we see around us, in the same way that Al Ginsberg retook the mainstream media for the consciousness revolution in the ’50s and ’60s. We may just have to use the master’s tools.
Alnoor | I’m not saying we don’t use the master’s tools. For example, we will need the Internet to organize effectively. We will need some capital to build the transition infrastructure to move outside the capitalist system. The question is what role will the established infrastructure play? How central will it be for the transition and the post-capitalist realities that we are creating?
By distinguishing the master’s tools, we are not creating dualism—the dualism already exists—we are actually understanding the power so we can use the master’s tools to more effectively dismantle the master’s house.
And perhaps I don’t have the same faith in the primacy these tools will play in the coming revolution, and I think that’s where the interesting tension is. For example, blockchain might be an ‘interconnector technology,’ but its applications are not neutral. The vast majority of currencies on the blockchain infrastructure are debt-based currencies, like Bitcoin. Their value is linked to the value of the US dollar. As such, they are speculation-based currencies that are increasing the amount of debt-based capital on the planet, therefore speeding up the destruction of our biosphere. My point is not that we don’t use the blockchain or the Internet. Of course, we should use any means necessary to speed up the revolution/evolution. The question is, what is the role these tools will play? Especially private pieces of infrastructure, like Facebook or Bitcoin? I have very little faith in them.
Daniel | I see Facebook and the Catholic Church as almost the same from my perspective, which is that they’re ready-made infrastructure at a time when we’re facing a global meltdown. They can reach a lot of people quickly, and get them to potentially work together. Under Pope Francis, the Catholic Church published a beautiful encyclical—Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home—which really opens the door for revisiting contemporary Catholicism as a redemptive ecological program.
And I don’t really know why it’s not happened yet. You have a billion Catholics, 600 million go to church every Sunday. Churches could be used as training grounds for permaculture and upcycling practices. Churches could be local centers for composting or resource sharing or even global infrastructure for ecological regenerative purposes.
Facebook is more problematic because it’s really owned by one person—Zuckerberg owns more than 50% of it—and it reaches more than 2 million people a day. If Zuckerberg was to have his environmental conversion moment, it is conceivable that he could say, “I have to use this platform I’ve built to try to save the world from catastrophe.” Unfortunately, I don’t know if he would have the mentality because there’s a problem when these private billionaires try to move into philanthropical roles. They often bring with them this very dichotomous engineering mindset, as we see with the Gates Foundation.
We’re heading off the cliff now. We’re like Wile E. Coyote when he runs toward no end, just before he looks down. As we as a civilization start to look down, crazy new possibilities are going to open up.
We have this communication infrastructure that now links humanity together in a way that was impossible, inconceivable even, a few decades ago. And, as I wrote in How Soon Is Now, it seems to me that that’s part of this evolutionary jump, that it’s almost like we have a global brain ready to go, we just have to figure out how to make it work.
Alnoor | I don’t disagree with that. What I’m trying to bring to the table is an analysis and understanding of power, how it works and how it’s historically worked. Can we really expect the Zucks of the world to be useful to the revolution?
Daniel | I don’t expect them to. But I hold the possibility open. I may fail in every respect, but I will feel better for having tried. So I don’t expect that these people will change, but you never fucking know.
Alnoor | I often go back to the W.H. Auden quote from The Age of Anxiety, which in some ways is the one-percenter motto:
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Of course, from a non-dualistic perspective, there is a fascist one-percenter lurking in the deep recesses of all of us. That part of us that would continue in the momentum of what is happening right now rather than to let our illusions die. And at same time, the Rex Tillersons and the Trumps and the Putins and the Modhis and the Zuckerbergs and the Gates of the world have their own agency and their own karma and, on a very real level, are not us.
In the end, we will have to take responsibility for the collective actions of our species. The inquiry I sit with is whether or not the wetiko is too far gone? I don’t know the answer to that and, of course, I don’t want to make up my mind up because that would preclude possibility.
Daniel | You should join me at the Burn this year [Burning Man]. It’s the religion of the one-percent and its Silicon Valley subset. We are running out of time. This is the moment to mobilize these people. We can go on an Ayahuascero missionary adventure and find out the answer to your question. We can see if the master’s tools will be willingly handed over to dismantle the master’s house.
Alnoor | Ha, that’s tempting. But I’m not sure if it’s my karma to have to convert the one-percenters. I’m more interested in infusing radical political spheres with spirituality, rather than trying to politicize those who believe they are already spiritual. When you think you’re already enlightened, there’s not much anyone can do for you. Let’s discuss this after the call.
Rhonda | Well, I’m really glad that you guys are going to go fix this mess that we’re in [laughter]. Let’s hope we can contribute to the quantum leap before the illusions of comfort consume us completely.
finals time
in the beginning song
before vertical urges
were birthed
this solar system
rose in totem
to revolving god
in the beginning wind
before senses
became flesh
stars tickled the firmament
until it surged
frozen laughter
in the beginning kiss
before lips
inner tongues lined a horizon
and spoke for this unpeopled earth:
every that ever is
all that always become at once
to my crust
uncover your oneness
unmask your antiquity
wear sweet robes of protein
study my nature as your own
and learn to beautify
this spinning ship
or singe with it
from a friction
no other courses
are offered
Three Poems
The Verge
Reason is a fine thing, but remember there are other ways
to live: by instinct or passion, or even,
maybe, by revelation. Try it. Come around again to the verge –
that place of about-to-open, near where we comprehend
and laugh and see. Why shouldn’t something marvelous
happen to you? Take even an occasion like this:
A man reading at night looked up at the window to find
a moose looking in, interested and unafraid
with quiet dark eyes. He reports he has never been the same;
he finds the ungainly and miraculous everywhere.
He said it started the next night in the empty window
as he watched his reflection looking right back through.
He said he saw his own beauty, how even in his same old face
the quiet eyes were curious and ready to be true.
The Sea Lion Tank
For Sam
Not split, but blessed into two, the double-world creatures: skin for water,
skin for air, the rising power and swimming down.
We watched so long we disappeared from our eyes,
left only hand-prints steaming on the glass
where the sea lion’s great blue eye passed, where
the wide scar on the throat
pressed a whole length of sight.
We stood under the worn path of arc and fall
until the restless crowds had gone,
until you said I am sad.
And I who said nothing,
who held you while you cried,
find that only when you are sleeping
can I say what I mean:
My little one, we choose for all things
out of a terrible power.
But to rise in the morning
could be to lift your head from that sleep
and love each salted star for what it may bring,
just as in the tank where the kings are held,
the far sea is still awaking
the body remembers and believes.
Previously published in Annie Lighthart, Iron String (Monmouth, Oregon: Airlie Press, 2013)
Morning Song
Quiet nights don’t require repentant mornings
but I have them anyway, bare
on a rack of bones over my heart.
I have not loved the world as I should
but later will go out into it again.
Marco Polo went of his own will
and yet when he heard the desert voices
knew he had been called.
From her little cell Julian saw the world
take form and then let go
while the bells of Norwich shook
out of shadow and air. Nothing
comes from nothing, not even
for us nonbelievers.
So light presses on our eyes
and does not ask us to see.
Previously published in Annie Lighthart, Iron String (Monmouth, Oregon: Airlie Press, 2013)
How Love Builds a Home
Replace fences with overturned lawn chairs.
Drape them with towels and blankets
– forts for the children of summer.
Adorn picture windows in autumn
with crimson construction-paper leaves,
carefully cut with your own calloused hands.
Decoupage pumpkins and gourds.
Hang felt jack-o-lanterns with crooked smiles
ascending a wrought-iron banister.
Dip blueberry muffins in cinnamon
and sugar. Pack them in a basket
for a grieving neighbor.
Pipe frosted bowties on gingerbread men.
Cut reindeer antlers from cardboard boxes.
Apply red glitter to young noses.
Shovel snow so wet and heavy
it makes your heart light.
Follow with fireside jigsaws and cocoa.
Paper your walls with memories.
Frame your front door with kindness.
Extend your hand across the threshold.
Three Poems
Burning
Incense is burning
slowly
through
this
deep
night
exactly
like me
Breath stoking body
to ember
to ash
smoke whispering
itself
away
fragrance kissing
it all
goodbye
Siren
A siren
woke me
up
while I was
meditating
entering
on an inhalation
Yes
I was
asleep
I mean
not
the nighttime kind
but the asleep
of not Awake
You might be
asleep
too
right now
even though
you are feeling
in to
these words
about Awakeness
I am not
criticizing
you
We are all
the same
Next time
you
will remind
me
like the siren
deeply urgent exhale
cutting through
the chaos
of traffic
trying to save
a life
So Many Words
There are only
so many words
we can use
to speak of
Silence
the kind that is
before sound
not after
Sacred speech and print
are just shadows
of the noteless symphony
unwritten
on blank sheets
There are only
so many words
We must choose
wisely
Just one
can drop the veil
or be one
too many
The Fairy Begs for Bacon
Dear Bacon Lady, I’m sorry I didn’t just go ahead and
buy you the savory meat that you showed me you wanted
once upon a time on line in a grocery store.
Your smile, with its few rotted teeth, was haunting. You ducked your head to
display your worth: beneath the white-skinned patroness.
Well, giving people a dollar has become reflexive.
Excuse me, I’m shy of humans, their salt-laced connections.
Forgive my mortal laziness. Did I miss a blessing?
It would fit that you’re not only poor, but homeless – though somehow
you’ve moved in with me. But I think of you roaming the city, a
latter-day fairy, with tests of large, messy caring.
May Everything Flower
Que Florezca Todo
May Everything Flower
– Roberto Lopez Moreno
What bitter memories lie dormant
in the earth. We are surely not innocent
of the ghosts at Tlatelolco or roaming the streets
of Chile and valleys of Colombia.
There is an empty space in our brain where the rest
of our body should be, an empty lot where nothing
grows, not even disdain or arrogance.
Nothing.
Beneath that lot lies the School of the Americas,
the KUBARK manual, and the directives of Henry Kissinger.
Lies paramilitaries and electroshock machines
and, collaborating with all of that, willful ignorance.
And Whiteness in the roots – a parasite that keeps
us alive while it eats us.
May everything flower –
even the memories that may accuse us,
might broil in our stomachs, catch in our throats,
might burn into the empty space in our brain,
might wrest us with the responsibility
to pay attention and destroy what pretends
to serve us – border walls and mass-produced fear.
Que florezca todo.
Todo.
A Tale of Two Pipelines
Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck is co-founder of Lancaster Against Pipelines and is a board member of the PA Community Rights Network. Her work involves bringing more awareness to the economic and political injustices of our U.S. system, one which preferences the rights of large corporations while exploiting communities and the environment.
Mallory Rose Spencer is a yoga teacher in Delaware County, PA and is a member of the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety (MCCS), a non-partisan grassroots group of residents whose goal is to educate elected officials and the public regarding the risks associated with the proposed Mariner East II pipeline.
Both activists came together with Kosmos to discuss how they are resisting the pipelines that are affecting their respective communities.
How were you called to resist the pipelines in your community?
Mallory | I’ve realized that, as a pretty well-educated, privileged person, I need to use my resources and skills more wisely and become more aware of how my actions and choices affect the ecosystem I’m a part of. When I started to see what was happening with Standing Rock in South Dakota in 2016, that was a wake-up call.
I began to consider the safety risks associated with pipelines and the environmental destruction and water contamination that was happening near me in the Philadelphia suburbs with the Mariner East II. That was how the responsibility started to awaken in me.
Malinda | I grew up in the woods of southern Lancaster County. I loved and appreciated the Earth at a very young age. My father was a hunter, and I’m a pacifist. Yet, even as a kid, I helped him butcher a deer that he shot in our basement, and I would cry. But then, I would eat the meat. From these experiences, I understood this reciprocal relationship of life and our dependency on the Earth around us.
My growing awareness of the excessive power of corporations to destroy for their own benefit is something that has been brought to my attention through this Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline Project that came through my community and is now in the ground around us. When I started learning about the power that the industry has to exploit and destroy—not only the Earth that we depend upon for life but the rights of individuals—for their own private benefit, I realized that this injustice was something I couldn’t just stand by and allow to happen without trying to change it.
What strategies have been most effective for you?
Malinda | We came together as a community, saying to the corporation, Williams Partners, “We’re not going to stand by and let you destroy our land. We will stand between you and the land if we have to.” We’ve had a thousand people sign pledges saying that they would stand with us in nonviolent direct action. To us, nonviolent direct action has meant we don’t wear masks, we are not criminals. We are residents who live here. We’re demanding justice in our own right, even if we have to get arrested for it, because what’s legal isn’t always ethical or just.
We have a strategic leadership group that plans the actions. We decided we would not destroy any equipment or possessions and do no violence to people. We don’t even interact with the workers. We come together at a pipeline construction site and hold hands, sing songs, and keep it positive. Everything we do comes out of the values we have as community members here in Lancaster.
Sometimes people get angry: “This is an injustice. It’s just wrong.” But I walk around before each action and have each person look me in the eye, and I ask them, “Can you commit to being non-violent today? If not, there is no shame in that, but walk away and come back next time when you’re in a better place.” This is to make sure everyone who’s going into the action with us is in a good place.
Before the pipeline was permitted, we went from door-to-door and made friends with all of the landowners that had not yet signed on with Williams. The Sisters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ was one group of landowners that we reached out to in friendship. The pipeline was planned to go through their cornfield.
The idea of building a chapel in the path of planned construction was powerful because it gave all of us a sacred space. We cut down some of the corn and built an arbor with an altar, and over three hundred people came out for the dedication of the chapel. It became a place of pilgrimage for people all over. Arlo Guthrie’s daughter was in town and came to sing a song because she heard about what we were doing.
Just recently, the head of the Sisters had an audience with Pope Francis, and gave him a letter about our challenge here and asked if could he make a statement in support of religious rights. He’s considering that right now.
It’s brought a lot of attention. People may not come to our actions because they don’t want to get arrested or be involved in that kind of resistance, but they support the Sisters. We even had a Rosh Hashanah service there. And we’ve had Buddhist meditation there. At the first action on the Sister’s property, 23 people were arrested, including a United Methodist Minister, a Presbyterian Minister, a Mennonite Minister, and a Buddhist teacher. So, it’s an ecumenical place as well, where people come together for the sake of protecting the Earth.
Mallory | We’ve learned so much from Lancaster Against Pipelines about non-violent direct action and trying to keep it positive, spiritual, and connected to sustainability and community values. Part of what’s so empowering is saying, “This is our community. We’re going to take ownership of it. We’re going to support each other. We’re going to protect each other.”
When a foreign entity comes in and challenges your rights—taking property, drilling in your backyard, cutting down trees that have been alive for two hundred years—it can be so easy to fall into a rut of resentment, frustration, anger, and fear and want to inflict that back. But you have to be really aware and strategic in your approach, with morals and values at the forefront.
For the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety, safety is the number one priority. If we’re out doing non-violent direct action and we’re making it unsafe for participants, then how can safety be a marker for our movement? It’s been really fascinating to be aware of not creating more of the problem.
And sometimes, you lose. It can feel like one step forward, two steps back. But then I look back and realize, “Wow, they said that they were going to finish this project in 2016, and here we are in 2018 and it’s still not done.” So clearly, we have had some sort of effect in slowing them down, at least.
What has your experience been navigating the legal system?
Mallory | We were trying to go through the court system, and that was hard because, for the most part, the laws were already in place to be on the side of the corporation. Many people are trying to support representatives running for office who are against the pipeline. Two people who were against the Mariner East II were elected to the Delaware County Council. Yet, we’ve struggled to maintain momentum because judges keep ruling in favor of Energy Transfer Partners despite their lack of commitment to the permits they were given. To have a company continually make these mistakes, have these spills, and not be held accountable for them is extremely disheartening.
So people stopped putting all their faith in these systems and started to say, “Okay, what can I do with my physical body to slow this down or to prevent this?” We really wanted to be trained by other groups like Earth Quaker Action Team, which is based in Philadelphia, and with Malinda and Lancaster Against Pipelines, and the National Lawyers Guild—all great groups who help you understand your rights and the risks associated with what you’re trying to do, in the name of what you believe is morally and ethically right.
Malinda | Initially, we contacted the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. It’s an organization that focuses on community rights. And one of the things they helped us realize is that every step of the way, power is taken away from communities in projects like factory farms, fracking, and pipelines because the jobs of the regulatory agents—the Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA—is to permit destructive progress. And they do that very well. Our elected officials pass laws that allow corporations to come in and exploit and destroy because everything is based on capitalism and greed. It’s not based on valuing the Earth or community values such as taking care of each other, buying locally, and protecting our fields so that we can continue to grow crops for the next two hundred years.
Where do you draw your inspiration?
Malinda | The work that we’ve done as Lancaster Against Pipelines, and the empowerment that we felt, certainly started with Standing Rock and the courage of the people who stood up against the pipeline out there.
My husband is a Native American religion professor. We lived on a reservation in Montana for years after we first got married. The injustice done to Native American people is just astounding. Their willingness to resist and to name injustice for what it is helped me learn that injustice ‘here’ and injustice ‘there’ is connected to injustice around the world.
Mallory | I couldn’t agree more. I like to refer back to a lot of the things that came out of the Civil Rights Movement because that’s a great example from which people can understand—just because something’s legal doesn’t make it right. When you have people asking for … no, when you have people demanding equality and demanding to be treated with respect, you can really start to experience positive change despite the pushback and the violence, and despite those who want to maintain the status quo.
Some of the people who used to work for Energy Transfer Partners don’t work there anymore, and I know the work we’ve done has influenced the way some people think about this pipeline. The first part in influencing people’s actions is through meaningful, honest conversation that encourages them to think differently. And that’s when we’ve had the most success. Not by screaming at each other, but by listening. You’ve got to really practice that compassion towards others if you want them to show it back to you. You have to try to be respectful, but you cannot be silent.
Malinda | My husband went to the chapel one day to weed-wack. There was a Williams industry worker, high-up, who always wears a helmet with stickers on it. He was reading the Land Ethic of the Sisters that we have posted there. My husband walked over to him and said, “Are you a religious man?” He responded, “Well actually, I am. I’m Catholic.” And my husband went on to have this great conversation with him about how this is coming out of faith, to protect the Earth.
The following weekend, my husband was locked down on a piece of equipment with a friend, getting arrested. The friend is Catholic and had a rosary with him. The police officers were roughing them up a little bit, and he dropped his rosary. When the officers were walking away, this man, the Williams worker, went over and picked up the rosary. He brought it over and gave it to one of our group members, looked at my husband, and nodded his head.
It was an acknowledgment of humanity, as if to say, “I’m not angry. I’m acknowledging that you’re doing what you think you need to do, and I can’t hold that against you. You’re going to want this rosary, and it matters to me that you get this back.”
Those are the situations when I think, “Everything we’ve done is worth it.” If those kinds of changes and questions are happening within people, we’ve made great progress. We can’t control how what we do affects others, but we can control what we do and how we do it. That’s where I put my energy, in making sure that my decisions are the best I can do most of the time and trying to find grace to allow myself to fail.
I am a Pastor at a Mennonite church, which is really involved in social justice issues. What gives me energy is being able to work with children in that community, to help them be aware of the interdependency of all living things. And to value their ability to have an impact on other people, by whether they greet them with a smile or a frown. Bring it down to the simple things, the things that we adults need to remind ourselves of because we’ve gotten so far away from what really matters.
Mallory | This process has been really life-altering because I’m starting to see more and more outside of myself. I’m trying to consider the livelihood of others as well as future generations. I hope part of the narratives that are being created with groups like MCCS, Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety, and Lancaster Against Pipelines is to keep people mindful and aware of the whole—becoming aware of the suffering and trying, as best we can, to lessen it.
Do We Really Want to Be Happy?
Why is the Dalai Lama always laughing? What fuels the ecstatic joy of former South African Archbishop, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama as they dance together with playful delight at parties?
The Dalai Lama’s fellow Tibetans have been through, and continue to traverse, the gauntlet of life subjected to suffocating Chinese rule. Black South Africans brutalized and oppressed under 50 years of spirit-numbing apartheid continue to struggle with the stacked deck of economic development in the global south. Yet these two iconic representatives of peoples who have experienced untold suffering, collaboratively write about, embody, and are consumed by pure, unmitigated joy.
Do we need to have lived the life of a monk or a spiritual warrior to be consumed by the perpetual joy that animates these two men? Most of us actually think so! We throw our hands up in frustrated resignation, assuming that a life infused with prolonged states of ecstatic joy is simply out of reach. We think that if we’ve not been meditating or on some transcendental path for decades, a joyous life is “above our pay grade.” What a quality-of-life bar to set for ourselves!
Joy doesn’t compute for most of us. We simply are not at all familiar with the energetic state of being consumed by sustained joy, or what it takes to intentionally summon the thoughts that generate it.
In fact, joy is most often the farthest thing from our minds. We all think about 60,000-70,000 thoughts per day, 75%-95% of which are the same thoughts we thought yesterday, the day before, and years before that. The preponderance of that percentage revolves around worry, anxious planning, feeling inadequate or mistreated, and suffering!
Typically, by the time we are in our mid-thirties, 95% of our life is lived on autopilot. We perform the same series of rote behaviors, hold the same beliefs, and are subject to the same emotional habit patterns that tie us to our past. In large part, we live our lives unconsciously through the automatic filters of past familiar, often traumatic, experiences. We are habituated to focusing our attention and aligning our energy with emotional states that range from discomfort to misery.
Yet, even as we’re caught up in this dense vortex of negativity and drama, we continue to yearn for and expect an improved quality of life! What’s wrong with that picture?
The reasons for habitually depriving ourselves of joy are legion:
We’re afraid to be happy. Happiness lies somewhere in the realm of the unknown and uncertainty, and the unknown is too scary for most people to contemplate for long. It’s much easier to cling to the familiar, cozy cocoon of suffering than to risk the uncertainty of change, even if that change might bring happiness. Suffering is a safe, culturally perpetuated and intergenerationally transmitted comfort zone. Or,
We don’t really know how to consistently invoke joy, and when it does appear by happenstance, we don’t know how to sustain it. Or,
We’re so unaccustomed to the state of unbridled joy that when it does break through into our lives, we feel profoundly uncomfortable. Anxiety starts to creep in as we wait for the other shoe to drop since we certainly don’t think we deserve to be joyously happy for too long! After all, in the West, regardless of whether we’ve moved away from the practices of organized religion, the old “original sin” tapes are still playing in the recesses of our minds. At some level, we believe that we are fundamentally bad people who must always be on guard in order to reign in our badness. We best not lose control and allow our true, sin-prone nature to raise its head above the barrier of consciousness! As long as we see ourselves as basically bad, we won’t accept sustained joy as a realistic option. Or,
Joy, happiness, and wellbeing aren’t trending in our circles. Engagement in the seductive drama and grit of “the struggle” is perceived as a much more authentic way to live. It is wallowing in the misery of the protracted “liberation struggle” that gives purpose to the lives of many. Happiness is viewed as incongruous with doing our part to battle injustice. To experience prolonged joy would mean that we’re not doing enough to “make a difference.”
When we’re in this space, we are choosing to identify primarily with our physical avatar* which lives in the realm of egoic, intellectual constructs, and which experiences itself as separate from everything in its environment. When we adopt this frame of reference, our resistance of external conditions is often a projection of internal unconscious resistance to looking at disturbing aspects of our own life experience.
We align our lives with deconstructing and raging against aberrant social conditions. We swim in scarcity and deprivation consciousness.
In this reality-frame, we resist, resent, complain, protest, and do battle with societal conditions. Our thoughts are about what has been or might be taken from us and what we do or don’t possess. We feel compelled to fight hard for our wellbeing and that of others. Our action is fear-based. We fear losing control, not measuring up, not contributing enough, not being competent or good enough. We focus on status and maintaining it. The world is dark, and death is feared as something painful and finite.
Unhappiness is more the norm than not, and prolonged periods of joy are rare if they occur at all. We waste precious energy propping up the ego, trying to skirt our fears, uncertainty, and lack of control. And in the long run, all of that effort is futile. We unwittingly invoke more suffering and socio-political aberration.
We’re wise to let go of the sense of “the struggle,” not to become doormats, nor to indulge in perpetual navel-gazing or to dilute our activism. We let go of the struggle-drug, the excruciating comfort zone, in order to liberate ourselves from being driven by limiting unconscious fears, patterns, and beliefs that keep us focused on deconstructing and analyzing the hellishness in front of us rather than generating its antidote.
Still, others among us think that displays of joy and raucous belly laughter would detract from meticulously cultivated, devout and gravely pious, or transcendent-peaceful-sage personas that we project.
Living a life of joy is a courageous choice in a society where culturally-anchored dissatisfaction, lack of self-acceptance, and, most especially, fear fuel the entire market economy that sustains our standard of living. Fear and unhappiness are therefore structurally condoned and fostered accordingly. We are complicit by buying and consuming in a futile attempt to fill the yawning chasm that’s gouged into our psyches by a felt-sense of fragmentation, separation, and loneliness.
Choosing to constantly align one’s self with joy and happiness, therefore, means that we’ve decided to swim upstream in a society where life is typically lived somewhere on a spectrum between restless sadness and quiet desperation. We’d need to deliberately and constantly affirm and choose wholeness over the polarization, separation, atomization, and stratification that pervades our culture.
Q. So, what’s the secret sauce? Enhanced, intentional focus on the vast, nonmaterial dimension of who we are as we simultaneously navigate the form-focused world. The likes of the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are incessantly laughing and buoyant with joy because they perpetually feel their oneness with—and are transparent conduits for—the nonmaterial enormity of who they are beyond the material realm.
To experience joy is to recognize, surrender to, and consciously integrate with a larger reality frame that dwarfs the form-focused world which captivates our attention most of the time. We are consumed by joy when learn to access and channel our true selves in each successive moment.
Pause for a long, refreshing moment and consider what it would feel like if our thoughts, behaviors, and habits were to revolve around joy, happiness, and contentment most of time! What aspects of our lives would shift if we divested our energy from battling our way through life with furrowed brows, and allotted it toward deliberately crafting lives that generate joy and wellbeing? What would our lives like that look like, feel like? What is it about our current thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that would need to change in order for that to happen? Are we willing to fundamentally disrupt our familiar, juicy drama and misery-laced comfort zones to let happiness in? How badly do we want to be consumed by joy?
First, we’d need to accept that such a joyful life is possible, is not Pollyanna pie in the sky, and is not above our pay grade! The fact is that we have the ability to deliberately and skillfully self-regulate the quality of our emotions. Self-induced positive emotions increase the coherent harmony in bodily processes and foster wellbeing.
We can choose to stand in the flow of the animating consciousness behind our avatars—the aspect of ourselves that is in alignment with the field of universal intelligence. The field, like the brilliance of the sun’s light is always present whether we’re conscious of it or not. The light is accessible even as the apparent gloom of suffering hangs heavy beneath the cloud cover which is generated and maintained by the collective unconscious
With intentionality, we have the capacity to progressively shed the heavy pall of limiting beliefs, false limitations, and the drama of the egoic self at will. With some discipline, we can learn how to remain in conscious communication with that field for longer and longer periods of time until the state of being consumed by joy becomes our norm.
More information at: Buddhist-Quaker.
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*Avatar —The physical body, a temporary vehicle for non-localized individuated consciousness which is subject to the rule-set of physics in its localized [apparently physical] reality-frame.
