Look Anew

Allow me to perorate on the matter of the Dao.

It has been a good few years, living out of a suitcase. I used to say as a teen that home is wherever I am. I endeavoured to be present there, to love there, to bring to bear my full self, there. It was meant to find comfort in emotional exile. Home, was unwell, and it is not a place geographically fixed. It is in fact a thing you carry with you as an identity modifier, as a calculator of value. Home is the compass by which you eke out a path from your directional poverty. At Home, God was dead. It had left us to the wolves along with all the favour seeking fools who thought that It might elevate their station in the world if they sang to It loudly and spoke to It just right.

All the meaningful words in the world, with all the most emotive expression, all the way into reverent, musical catharsis, did not bring us into alignment with the Dao. Pathologically trying to do the Good thing all the time. Trying to do the right things in the eyes of a personified idea-structure, as it is written – and unfortunately perilously translated and re-translated – so that we may attain purity and become sufficiently worthy of all the good things that are promised us in this tampered-with text. Now this is similar to communism in the way that some might think “well, you were just not doing it right. If you do it our way it really is great”. No, there are catastrophic flaws in the code.

God had died a dishonorable death in the eyes of a desperate kid. Faith and the sacred had become a joke. People tickling themselves silly as they try to stoke the flames of higher meaning and divine destination with their poetic appeals to their deity, their extensive charity campaigns and their evangelical outreaches. Watching these animals fail to integrate their education was worrying and sickening. We think too much of ourselves to consider us as part of the animal kingdom, and yet we can’t seem to act quite superior. People need real help, it became clear, and real help means actionable tools they could carry with them into the darkest holes they climb in, and into the dirtiest faults of their being. People need self empowerment, they need behavioural economic adaptors. People need to be offended and find out why they find themselves in such an affront. People need a hand to guide them out of the subterranean passages where they nest and find ways to be less of a sightless boar.

I often wonder, why didn’t we learn basic psychology in school? Also, finance and taxes as mandatory? These things are not optional in life. You have a psyche, and you need money to even drink water. But we know all too well about Jesus! Then you grow up and your lights aren’t on because Caesar stole the money meant for maintenance, and you have to defend yourself against criminals because Caesar stole the money meant for the police, and you’re replacing your cars wheel because Caesar stole the money meant for road upkeep. Then you realise, just because his face was on the money does not mean it was his damned money. Not like the dude behind the saying  was steering clear of politics man! He just didn’t have all the answers man. Love sure is the right message! But no amount of imaginary love substitutes the actual love of a person who bothers to look at you, and touch you, and really gets to know you. Not “know you” like you know every chap and his friend from the corner shop to your weekly hangout. Know You, as in remembers your fears, remembers what you like most, knows you well enough to give you a gift that matters to you. Most importantly, having a person that can tell you when you’re being an asshole, and can tell you in your ear before you leave that they love you more than you know, and you can remember that voice, that face, the softness of the embrace, when you one day realise what that meant! It is a function of familial care. It is a spirituality that is built out of the nucleus, the sheer richness of intimate relationship.

I’ll somewhat ironically tap into my historical role as accidental hierophant of sorts. It may not be sufficiently exoteric, but then again in seeking to speak to all, one may well speak to none truly, and when I say “speak” it is not to the arbitrarily intrigued mind but to the seeking innards. I like to speak to bits of apprehension within a person that sit in waiting like a secondary consciousness. One’s higher self in a sense, having observed, but not dared to put words to the notions that point outside of the philosophical corner you’ve sat yourself down in. You know, that part of you that says “but thát though…” which you find annoying because the thing it’s pointing at is in a place where you cannot refer to the relevant party present as “we”. It is just You there. Just You and the stuff that makes you so. Just you and the essential. Just you, and the Dao.

These are like things you have a sense of, a knowing of sorts, but that you haven’t sufficiently examined or defined and have not formed part of your formal frame of reference. You are certainly not about to plant a stake in such a hill. These are typically the parts of you that float to the surface in times of strain. When you find yourself in a spot of desperation. When your toolkit hitherto comes up wanting.

In speaking, I also speak to myself. Perhaps I speak to myself first in this, and allow others to sit in for it.

When you’ve found someone from another world that in many ways is the same as your world, but it differs philosophically for a miriad of reasons – of which all has not been endeavoured to be understood by both parties- and yet all the most essential parts seem impossibly aligned.. you may begin to question the parts of you that resist such alignment. Your pride is challenged, your ego gets triggered, and you have to navigate carefully between the edifices of your innards. What exactly is it that I am afraid of? What am I wanting to object to? Why is it that my pride is illuminated alongside this moral principle I thought I held myself to. How is this a distinguished or respectable position if it threatens to stand in the way of receiving the most profound gift you have ever received? We know pride isn’t good. Quoting a verse of someone else saying it does not bring anymore integrity to what I’m saying. The “we” factor is after all what is worrying us here. Why must there be a “we and our texts that prove us right”? Sure we can say we are humbly following what is written in our admitted ignorance. But I’d sooner remain in a place of eternal, humble discovery and unfolding, than staking a hill and fencing up the place in an effort to flesh out the sense of certainty that a message or a discovery may offer. Humility isn’t that low fat, tepid “we don’t know the way of the Lord”. Humility is, having been bold and tenacious, to still know you may be wrong, and welcome the evidence. So, what must be as a matter of human necessity is the quality of relationships that can carry us through the darkest storms of life. And perhaps at the end of a long and full life, all you could truly have ever known will be the quality of those relationships. They will have been the only thing that was certain, and if that was all you endeavoured to honor, you will have honored what was most real. You will have honored the commitment and efforts of a flawed being, dedicated to a cause for better or worse, for love. So when a pontificating man says God is Love, may he speak no further.

“So, Mr hierophant, did God speak to you?”

No.

“Did you speak to God?”

Well there was plenty of speaking, and singing, and often it felt really good. Like REALY good. But I couldn’t tell you what it did for me apart from a bit of catharsis here or there, or perhaps catharsis as a rule. So why did we do it? There was an earnest seeking after truth, and a desperate hope for salvation from the suffering induced by a broken psyche. It was not per happenstance, not because it was kind of cool. We needed this, or what we thought it promised, and we needed it badly. Like I said, if a man says God is Love, then that may be the most correct he’ll be. Love doesn’t speak, love does.

In seeking adaptability I’m confronted by questions: How can I bring myself to embrace a performative practice that has done nothing but fill the faces around me with despicable piety? How can I speak to a deified conception that has only proven to be a misconception under the pressures of a harsh reality? How am I to appease all the little clowns? It may be worth noting that all this comes from a man who has come around to find sympathy with the various spheres of religious practice again. We all need something, and as far as education goes, accessibility is a key factor. All you need is a gateway, or something to get the mind’s gears turning.

Here’s the thing though. I don’t appease. That would mean there is no integrity to my beliefs, and it means I don’t regard what I believe as something worth understanding to all. The position I hold is not one of hopeful, wild abandon. It has been a long fucking road, I didn’t crawl out from under a rock just yesterday. I am indeed proud of my progress, and remain very aware of my limitations. This is not haughtiness, I’m wrestling with this in earnest, because I have not come this far to revert back to something out of fear or insecurity. I know very well why I stand where I stand. I know very well that what I hold within has value beyond my own comprehension. So what is bothering? I think what is bothering is the stinking fear emanating from the shadows of trained ignorance. I am challenged to treat the condition with respect, while the injustice to it’s host infuriates me.

Pride is a common denominator among these systems of thought. “I have it right” and perhaps “you are deluded” or “you are lost”. Even though there might be a certain humility in each of the ways that we can conceive of us and our world having come into being and persisting, the deep concern we all share is that if we are wrong and don’t have our asses covered, we might be biblically screwed. So what we all share is the awareness deep inside of all the things we really don’t know. In our busy little minds we take the story and the facts that we hear and read and we manufacture an event horizon that feels known, as if we could possibly control what comes over that horizon. No amount of wishful thinking or pleading to a god alters reality in any one person’s favor. That is such a silly little self involved notion. In every story you will find that some people suffer and find salvation from that suffering. Some people suffer and die. Some people live with lives full of expansive joyous privileges and they suffer still. Some people cruise through life without ever having to comprehend the depths of despair a human can experience. But it is in the doing that you find a different way, a change in fortune. Perhaps when you recognise your want with sufficient earnestness to express it, it precipitates into directed action on your part. Perhaps when you stop your frantic clawing at your environment for control you find peace. Perhaps when you bother just a little bit it becomes apparent that you might have more of a say in your destiny.

We’re talking about surrender. We’re talking about stewardship. We’re talking about taking the matter of your life sufficiently seriously so as to give it some shape and purpose. Perhaps if we can utter our innards, and we can recognise that we are wanting, we’re already stepping into the Dao. Perhaps if we don’t take it all too seriously, out of the ego and out of fear, we’re stepping into the Dao.

Now, all of our existential traction control accoutrements by necessity carry a very personal signature. I think one of the things that bother me is where others begin to believe that their standardisations meant for the primary school of the human spiritual education is indefinitely relevant. When people believe their individual spirituality is inextricably linked to the social rigging of their primary school, their clergy hangout. Your identity is tied to that. Your perception of yourself is tied to how you believe they see you and want to see you. You become the butter they spread thin on their communion. You become the juice they decant in equal measures. You become the thing that must perform because it is what is expected and for no other good reason. It may not be them doing all that, it may just be you. Nobody will say it explicitly because that teases the fibres apart of what isn’t a very fine weave. Until the day comes when all is not well, and oh does that day come for all of us. This counts equally for those who stepped out into atheism. The contents of your curriculum may have changed, but you’re still in school.

So the perception of identity plays a strong role in your spirituality. By “spirituality” I generally point at the structure of psychological, biological and emotionally integrative practice. You are one person, but you are not the same thing to yourself as you are to another. You are many things to many people, and it is not upon you to service each of those identities. That version of you, is theirs, and what they do with it within the privacy of their minds is theirs too. When we concern oursleves with that we give people blind handles on our sovereignty, and that is power. People are bad at managing power over others. Boundary setting is one of the biggest subjects of education for people graduating from their spiritual primary school. We spend ourselves on others to grease the gears of a social machine, and we need to be very clear about what the inputs and outputs of that machine is. Because when you spend so much of yourself that you are unable to progress in your private integrative practice, then you’re approaching a pathological outsourcing of what should really be an in-house project.

That said, if you don’t need any of this so much, what does it matter. Why do you do any of it? Because it’s kind of cool? Because it helps you? With what? Because you want a network? Or do you want perpetual distraction from the honest, deep intimacy you never cultivated? From the fear of the intense vibrations that emerge when you sit there with yourself, and the Dao.