Recommended Listening: Someone by Sychro
Artwork by Lia Halloran
Liberation and healing are not finding an undiscovered country. They are the clouds breaking over the valley and feeling the sun in your body and soul.
One of the most important lessons of psychoanalysis is that every form of suffering and illness of the soul and mind have some element of narcissistic wounding. These are the artifacts of another world, a world of an Other, that interrupted something which could only be stopped by a god.
There are no greater teachers than the sting of reality and the pain of separation..
There is no greater adversary than the mind constructed upon shame. There is no greater ally than the mind seeking liberation. In the end, they are not separate and exist in a state of nonduality with each other.
Living in the binary world doesn’t leave much room to live at all.
Grief is a great serpent. It is one long cord of blood, bone, sinew, and muscle that moves this way and that. I once hated this serpent. It tormented me in dreams and in every shadowed corner of life. I’m learning to make friends with it. It sometimes stings and stabs. But only when I grab too tightly. Otherwise, it is all too happy to slither its way through me and past me so it can just go on its merry way.
For we are astronauts! Some of us live, some of us die. But each and every one uses our narwhal-tusked hearts to jut into the darkness, feeling and reaching for light, air we can breathe, water we can drink, and something that will make us feel awe at being alive at all. We keep searching and searching and flying and falling because we can do nothing else. But maybe we get lucky and we fall upwards into something beautiful and beyond the bounds of this heavy earth that we so desperately love and yearn to escape from. See you out there, fellow astronaut.
Becoming real means holding all your pain, all your love, all your hate, and all your loss with dignity. For these things confirm beyond all doubt that you are real, that you exist. It marks the way that your existence itself has torn a hole into reality and claimed a place for you. It says, “I was here. I am here. I will always be here even when there is but emptiness where I stood.” But you and no other must carry these stones and this light with all the terrible dignity you can muster. What other hope is there in living?
You may never be able to save someone from dying. But you may be able through your compassion, presence, and love of existence, help them see there is a reason to stay alive.
After all the searching, there is just you standing at the end of a long road, waiting patiently for me. What a joy it is to find that which is both fluid and concrete all at once, that shimmering gold that catches my gaze when I smile at how long the search has been and how short the distance to home is. It is but the backwards step into that which lies behind my eyes and mind.
Your capacity to be fully real is inextricably tied up with your ability to fully access and feel your emotional states. The ultimate devastation of emotional neglect and spiritual suffocation is to turn that which is your greatest source of being real and being alive into your greatest enemy.
When rage and hatred are in their proper places, fear will finally be in its proper place.
In the end, it all comes down to one thing: do you have basic goodness or not? Because if you have it, then everyone has it, despite all the pain and terror and destruction that we can and will do to each other. And no amount annihilation can ever take it from you.
The mind cannot be prepared for “meeting your shadow” because it does not live in your mind and persona. You can only prepare your body for turning towards the shadow cast by your heart from the sun’s position relative to your body. Do your best to always notice from which direction the sun is being cast upon you and then you will know your shadow and the direction of all the things that have been hated and cut off most from your self. The shadow is not a thing but a phenomenon of physics and light.
We can tolerate what has already happened to us. What we cannot tolerate is the feeling that what has happened to us is is still happening. Overwhelm and the experience of trauma is the collapsing of past into present for eternity.
Of all the sources of separation and suffering in our current era, greed has a privileged place in the great horizon of our experience. And this is greed of not just money and commodities but also time, affection, love, sex, closeness, pleasure, and all the rest of it. While greed is likely a common human experience across all time and space, under capitalism, greed has become the primary way of making meaning and organizing one’s experience of the self and world. Capitalism has colonized (as it colonizes all markets and forms of life as a general rule with the profit motive and constant expansion from a place of lack) the very means of making meaning of human experience and perception. Our perceptual functioning and meaning-making of experience have been mobilized through the primary aperture of greed and constant expansion and not enough-ness as a primary way of creating capitalist subjects (i.e. slaves under the illusion of maximum freedom) to maintain its functioning. In Buddhist philosophy, greed is one of the primary sources of our suffering from the way it reinforces the illusion of the self and our separation from each other and all other beings and nonbeing alike. In this regard, it is inevitable that capitalism will continually create increasing states of mental and emotional devastation among its subjects because the very organizing principle of the human under capitalism is with the chains of the self and its corresponding sufferings. To be a capitalist subject is to suffer with no name for that which is the cause of your suffering inside of the system that created you.
You and I are not anxious. The mind is anxious. You and I are not depressed. The mind is depressed. If we share one suffering with the illusion that it is unique to either of us, then this means the mind we share is also one mind with us laboring under the illusion that they are separate. Truly, we may not ever know another being’s mind with perfect clarity but this is only if we take the mind to be defined by its fluctuating states and thoughts in any given moment. What can be know is this one mind that we share without separation.
As I sit with myself and with the others in this room, I clearly see that the thoughts and pains that arise from my own clouded and deluded mind are like the thin oily film that sits atop this bowl of water. While it may not be pleasant, one sip and it is gone!
There is a vague feeling in my chest that long ago, before I could form clear thoughts and memories, I was utterly defeated – cut down and left to die by a vague enemy of which I could only intimate the word “love” for. With that defeat, my hatred and rage were buried and I learned that its best to just accept my fate because by what grace of the gods can you ever defeat an enemy that you are compelled to love? But somewhere deep in the ash is an ember, smoldering white hot and liquid with that rage and hatred for my conqueror, my tormentor, my jailer. And that hatred I shall call by the name Dignity. And Dignity shall be that vague body memory of freedom lost and the joyous possibility of freedom found once again.
For something and someone to be born anew, something and someone must die. Sacrifice is and has always been the law of religious and natural renewal and revival. There is nothing that can be created or destroyed but only transformed, including that which is in you born from fear, pity and despair. If you shall remove the stone in your heart, it must be sacrificed on the altar of the body and mind to create a vacuum for the new. Sacrifice is not some special thing to occur when the stars align or when the drought demands appeasement of the gods – it is occurring right here, right now, all the time, incessantly. You can not chose to stop it. You can only choose to turn your eyes to the past as the safe harbor of your small, feeble self. Make no mistake: you will face the truth of death and life either in this breath or your last.
This whole universe of death, rebirth, suffering, liberation, and endless light and dark is but a long cadence of call and response. What is suffering and the liberation from suffering but the primary call and response of all beings?
