Adam Kadmon’s writing can also be found on his political theory and psychology blog, Capillaries: Theory at the Front.
Recommended Listening: Hania Rani – Nora
It is only when we realize how truly unimportant we are in this world can we finally be free of the tyranny of other people’s opinions and actions, not least of which are our own. Only then can we begin to accurately assess how essential we are to the universe.
Self-hatred is but a symptom of the victory of someone else’s mind over our own.
Wisdom is knowledge that has passed through the gates of fear.
No amount of analyzing and understanding the darkness will make the light come. You must simply go to where the light is.
It is a great relief, a liberation even, to be wrong. The ecstatic joy of being freed from our own convictions. Our greatest terrors and despair arise from the things we believe to be most unshakably and undeniably correct about ourselves and the world. Ideology is both a necessary symptom of any political and economic system but also of any internal and somatic/emotional/psychological system.
Disgust is the most necessary but most misunderstood emotion for healing our wounds. The abundance of life and pain within the networks of relations and material conditions at some point has ruined us. When we have been poisoned by the world and by others, it is first essential to spit the poison from one’s mouth.
To be wounded is to be poisoned. In the end, all violence and trauma is an attempt to negate what simply is. To heal is to reject twice over, to negate the negation totally. To be whole is to say yes again to all of existence, completely with abandon, with full awareness of your pain and with terror in your heart after a lifetime of no.
Our first and most enduring ways of making reality tolerable are to speak and to pay attention.
Mistakes are an impossibility, a phantom of human consciousness. You are born from the viscera of the earth and never separated from it – does the earth make mistakes?
The greatest mercy of depression is that it completely erases its origin and function. It is a compassionate assassin. Who would ever think of the midst of metaphysical torture, that unending catastrophe of nightfall, that it has a strange kind of love at its heart?
You could not be alone in the way you think you are, the way you dread most, even if you wanted to be. Pure isolation is an impossibility. Our fear of abandonment and isolation is most truly a fear of the utterly nightmarish awareness of the ineradicable connection of all things. Which is to say the embodied truth.
One day, during my walk under the trees, I clearly saw how my body is just a walking and talking sentient nervous system – a narwhal’s tusk jutting into existence, into flesh, trying to hold reality like a child holding their favorite toy. Then I saw everyone around me and all beings as a whole in exactly this same way. All just children desperately trying to hold our toys lightly and play. The expansion of both compassion and grief in that moment was true ecstasy. For a moment, I could smell the leaves of the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya and felt the hot dirt beneath my feet. I wept over the great eons of time I’ve spent not seeing this. Ah, how the horror of revelation can strike at any moment!
A wise mushroom once led me to a door inside myself. It said this door led to the chamber of the Absolute. To enter, it told me my ego, my fears and my hunger, must remain outside. To this, my ego viciously responded with the forces of the universe that bind all things together. Only when I agreed to never leave it behind and abandon it, to return always, did it agree to wait. In the chamber, I faced the Absolute and clearly saw how it is a necessary construction to shield us from our equal powers of destruction and creation. To shield us from the awareness all things are mirrored jewels. That there is nowhere to go, ever. And that we are both the grass in the field and the breeze blowing through the blades.
Behind every paranoic is a devastated and grief-stricken child.
Our consciousness is not an isolated thing, an island just drifting through time and space. It is a wave constantly ebbing and flowing in and out, crashing and flowing into other waves, always receding back into itself. Our consciousness is never just our own.
The ultimate frontier of my life, the great horizon, is to just surrender and let go. But surrender as a practice, as an art form, first requires the capacity to be held and supported so you can rise to the heights and sink to the depths of surrender. Will you watch over me with gentle eyes when I let go? I must feel the soft buoyant ground beneath me and the vastness of the sky above me to leap. Some of us miss this most important of all experiences earlier in life. A metaphysical thief stole it while we slept or whimpered in a corner. But there is always the chance for recovery because unless we received this blessing of the sacred fall, we never leave that place. We must redeem ourselves and reality itself or remain there for eternity. Our own mothers and fathers were not the earth and the sky? Then we shall go directly to the earth and sky and find a way to surrender there. All parents are simply reflections, refractions of light, of them, anyway.
Inside my body is a vault. Inside this vault is an operating room. Inside this operating room are two tables. On these two tables are my two children. One child carries a rift in space and time within his heart. There is no past and no present in there. The other child’s mind has become a great simulator, as large as the Sombrero Galaxy, with no escape – only possibility and abstraction. There is only the future in this fearful machine. Their hands embrace warmly as my surgical instruments do their work – my scalpels and thread, my life’s work. There is no pain here but there is great sorrow and joy. They are on their way home to me soon. I am excited to see them. Some wounds must be closed and some wounds must be opened to heal.
We are all just here playing games with each other. Some are stupid. Some are deadly. But they are all just games. I have decided I will jump in, find my place, and play!
Please prepare me to be a sanctuary. May my body and gaze be a refuge for all beings, a place that shall never be torn asunder by anyone or anything.
