Adam Kadmon’s writing can also be found on his political theory and psychology blog, Capillaries: Theory at the Front.
Recommended Listening: Bremer/McCoy – Gaia
You must place your mind in your heart. You must place your mind in your heart. Your only choice is whether to resist or accept this inevitability. If you do not do this in this life, you will face the inevitability in death. Paul Tillich’s definition of faith as related to matters of ultimate concern makes the reunification of mind and heart one of religious significance – which is to say of utmost metaphysical and ethical priority. It requires complete surrender of one’s constructed identity and facing down the fear that makes your heart quiver. The mind cannot embrace death and the shaking in your knees. But the heart is built for this purpose. May we all one day find our mind in our heart.
Who is most afraid of the conductor not leading the orchestra – the conductor or the orchestra? A conductor standing on a street corner, conducting no one but the cacophony of noise and movement existing of its own accord, is an exercise is cosmic absurdity. We chuckle at his illusion of power and control. A conductor without an orchestra is a petty tyrant playing at being a master of reality. Are we also not deserving of the same chuckle? At the very least our little minds are deserving of it.
This will all be over soon. You reading this. Your life. My life. Our lives. These systems. This epoch. This species. This planet. This galaxy. The universe itself. But it will come back. Where are we all trying to get to and being in such a rush to get there?
There is no better instantiation of capitalism’s logic than the slaughterhouse. It is both the beginning and end of the capitalist system’s logic. Wanton slaughter of the planet and all animals is the alpha and omega of profit. The act of killing another being has been abstracted from one or a small group of people to a gargantuan apparatus of machinic violence where the division of labor brings the capacity for unimagined productivity and unimagined murder. This productivity is and always has been one of cold violence and death. This productivity is built upon and demands the denying of the emotions, psychology, the very agency of all animals, human and non-human, to maintain itself. The screaming sow as it is boiled alive and the workers lowering them into the vat are both being murdered in different ways. And both are required for this cool logic of death to continue unabated. And is the person buying the packaged flesh from that pig any less dehumanized? Being molded into a consumer of planetary death is its own type of spiritual and emotional violence. In the division of labor of planetary violence, everyone is a victim and dehumanized. What is the only answer to dehumanization? To remake the concept of the human and to unleash divine violence and spiritual warfare upon that which will devour us all. If we are lucky, tears but not blood will be shed.
Why do we always assume that chanting, prayer, and meditation is about allowing us to transcend this body and be heard by the Absolute? When we fervently chant and pray with trembling in our hearts, yes, we do indeed build a bridge to the Spirit but not just to be heard by something higher than ourselves. We also build the bridge to pull Spirit down into matter. When I pray, I rip that spirit which exists in the nothingness into my hands and say, “I am you and you are me and you will hear me.” The chant and the prayer are a call, a demand, upon the Absolute to show itself in the flesh and the rock and soot of the material world. It is to wield that sword of Damascus and hang it over the head of all that makes me weep.
Often we look back into the intergenerational swarm of family, genes, feelings, trauma, pain to understand why this chasm yawns in our heart. We always miss that we do not just have families and bodies – we have a matrix of origination. The family is a material object, a political object, a web of energy and information that is part of the earth and time. The gravel and seeds of the hard earth shape my life just as much as the ice and rock of our family’s hearts.
In dialectical pessimism, a core principle and stance towards reality is that we embrace the courage of hopelessness if we hope to stand up against the tide of destruction facing down upon us. What could cause more pain and suffering in this world then the unacknowledged hopes of the children in our hearts? With every hope comes a silent expectation. With every expectation comes a silent betrayal of self. With every betrayal of self comes a quiet rejection of the entire universe. There is no quicker road to despair. Is it possible to completely abandon all hope? Perhaps. By attempting the impossible, we shall discover the secret blades hidden within the cloak of the self that hopes which wound us so deeply with every breath and movement. I lovingly abandon all the hopes I can to find the root of my suffering.
Capitalism’s belly spans the globe, its long, thin neck stretches to the heavens punctuated by a mouth the size of a the needle’s eye. How can we not become hungry ghosts when the entire world teaches us that there is not and will never be enough. To be content is an act of rebellion.
My desire for vengeance is equal in proportion to the lack of justice I have experienced in this life. My capacity for forgiveness is equal in proportion to the experience of having my fury and desire for vengeance held and loved by myself and others. True justice may belong to the cosmos alone but I cannot allow it to be the deliverer of this justice until the wound is acknowledged.
Do you have a nervous system? Do you experience pain, sickness, old age, and fear of death? Then by what right do you deny your birthright to be a bodhisattva and walk through the Pure Land of the buddha-fields? You have everything you need to walk among the gods – what are you waiting for?
I have often warmed myself by the fire of vengeance and fury. It provided the only comfort and warmth I could find during very cold days and nights. I’ve watched it flicker and whip itself in the wind with no thought as to who built it and placed it here for me. Its heat would wrap up my body and swaddle me like a mother with her infant. No one taught me that the chill in my body would never cease as long as this was the only fire I could find. But how dare you ask me to give up the only warmth I’ve ever known when you understand nothing of the frozen nights I’ve shivered through? Maybe if you come to help keep my body warm with closeness, I can finally give up this addiction to fire.
I have also warmed myself by the fires of greed and discontentment. When I ask myself, “what do you lose by being content and stopping this endless cycle of birth and death?” My self answers, “only the entire possibility that I can reshape the entire universe to look at me with love instead of hatred I feel so often from it.”
Contraction and expansion – a dance of the universe, of revolutions, of disaster, of generation, and of our ability to be present and feel into the flesh of the body and the planet. How can one rebel against helplessness and participate in this intractable law of reality? Quite simply: you dig your right foot into the dirt and spew forth the same infernal no that caused Lucifer to be expelled from heaven.
Of all the things I’ve done in this life, I think learning the terrible art of grieving and holding both love and hate in the same hand are my greatest accomplishments.
Foucault once said that “the self” was a historical creation, a political and cultural myth built of power’s desire to discipline and punish. And that it might one day be washed back into the ocean like a grain of sand, remembered only as a historical dream. What would replace it? Something more fluid and less solid – a process instead of a thing. But if the self is not a thing but a process, where do you draw the boundaries and contain a process? There is only the flow of interdependence that would regulate its functioning. Perhaps we do not need to wait – perhaps Foucault did not express how much he already felt the self sliding quietly back into the depths.
What happens when one’s questions are met with silence, withdraw, deceit, rejection, and even destruction by those we need answers from most? We will then turn language into a battering ram to knock down the walls that keep us separated and alone. I will become a barbarian of symbols and cacophonous noise to lay siege to this silent tower you occupy.
Fear is just energy moving through the body. When it can’t move through the body, when you deny and block it, how can you ever face the unlimited suffering of humans, animals, the environment, and planet as a whole? What kind of revolutionary cannot feel the unlimited suffering of all life they are connected to and a part of? A terrified little messiah-in-waiting.
In Indra’s net, we can only reflect back to each other the beings that we are. But if we do not know who we are, then we can only reflect what we have been told we are by others and the world. When we have had a war of all against all mirrored to us as the truth of reality and of ourselves in it, we become child soldiers in the war of the self against the self against the selves. We can only reflect back fear, violence, hatred, and greed to ourselves and those around us. Warfare becomes our only means of communication, which is to say we are mute. I hope one day I can see you reflect myself back to you with diamond hearted clarity. And I can do the same for you on that day. Maybe we will dance together. I hope so.
Shunryu Suzuki once stated that if you can clear the mind through a sort of decluttering process of ideas and symbols, true knowledge would already be yours. Knowledge not as light but as perfect darkness – this is the only path forward it seems to me. This empty knowledge like the dark sky cannot be accumulated or hoarded for self-worth or gain. It cannot offer any promise of salvation or quick fixes to your suffering or the world careening toward the brink. But no amount of knowledge of light, of accumulation and brightness, could offer these to you or us anyway. They only offer their insidious processes of salvation and addiction. Maybe if I can forget all these bright stars in my mind I can finally allow the true flash of knowledge crack across the dark sky. Then maybe we can figure out how to save the world together.
A process and interpersonal neurobiological theory of trauma: There is no separate individual self. There is only the dynamic feedback loop of the mind, body, and relational and material conditions of the environment constantly relating to each other. These three aspects which continually flow and shape each node in the loop through the remaking of material, ideological, and spiritual expression in reference to the other three. Trauma occurs when the amounts of energy and information flow in the circuit are so intensified through catastrophic violence, coercion, manipulation, and deceit that the nodes of mind and body can no longer process and integrate this energy and information effectively. The circuit will continue to repeat the same interruption in time despite the physical body and environment continuing to move through both time and space in conjunction with each other. Time is destroyed. Empty time (experiences of time that are absent of energy, meaning, life) becomes the experience of a mind and nervous system in tis shattered loop and interpreted as objective fact. No information has flowed sufficiently through the system to conceptualize that this is not an ontological reality but a temporal problem. There is no greater tragedy than existing in multiple points in time at once. Madness is occupying different realities of bodies and space than those around you. Trauma is occupying a fragmented flow of time while those around you experience unity of time and space. Healing trauma is reintegration of time through dislodging the stuck energy and information flow of long lost moments of pain and terror so the flow can resume its rightful dynamic. Revolution at the subjective level matches the process of revolution and healing at the systemic and material level.
