Adam Kadmon’s writing can also be found on his political theory and psychology blog, Capillaries: Theory at the Front.
Recommended Listening: Prayer by GoGo Penguin
My greatest enemies are the ghosts that haunt me who do not realize they are dead and buried.
The desire for transcendence is never greater than when we totally deny its possibility. In the heart of The Void are always the embers of hope that we dare not utter its name for fear of being destroyed if something fails.
My greatest fear is that I will fail at loving myself if I really try. But failure is not an option. Even more – it is an impossibility. We only fail at loving ourselves when we tell ourselves the noble lie that we lack the capacity to do so. It is this noble lie which ensures that the entire internal oppressive regime we live under continues to function and be inscrutable.
Joy is not a thing to be possessed or an experience to be had. It is an inherent quality of time unfolding into space which we can partake of under the right inner conditions of the mind and body.
We are so scared of being happy. Scared because what if it means we could have been happy all along and we got in our own way out of fear or fanatical commitment to our unhappiness?
We have been with you always. We will be with you until the end of time. There will never be a time or place or experience where we will not be with you, Little Ones. We will always be there – guiding you, loving you, protecting you, celebrating you, especially when you are in the darkness and cannot see or hear. We can see in the dark. We are trustworthy and capable of all things together.
The greatest injustice is asking a being to be responsible for themselves and others before they are ready and able.
Trauma is about facing death. Healing is about facing life. Facing death is easier despite all the assumptions guarding us from this realization.
My inner world is a massive psychedelic jungle gym with a circus perpetually in motion inside of it. I have found it looks quite terrifying to anxious adults and their child parts from the outside. Very often, our fears of being hurt and judged overwhelm our deep desires for experience.
All creative acts and artistic production are simply ways of discharging energy. There is nothing miraculous in this. However, the true miracle of art is that simply by being in its presence, energy is discharged in some similar way in the witness. The mysterious space between the artist and the witness is the miracle itself. Miracles often present as space or emptiness from our vantage point.
Doing nothing is a skill and a practice of highest virtue and sacredness, especially in a system such as capitalism. It is rivaled only by the sacredness of play.
We believe in a system and practice to master it to the degree that we one day hope to be a tyrannical ruler of that system. In the meantime, we are frustrated little dictators. Be humble, little dictators.
There is a difference between a king and a tyrant. A king invites all beings into the field of freedom. A tyrant, even a benevolent one, works to trap all beings in a system and a framework of death and stasis. Tyrants cannot rule in the field where the winds of spirit cause the grasses to sway and shudder.
Are we here to help each other or are we here to take from each other? This is the difference between Freud and his rebellious disciples like Jung or Adler. At least they had the courage to strike out on their own and rebel, even if they found their rebellion in the flawed systems of their own making. They were infinitely more courageous than their aging father, Freud. And that’s why he hated them for it – the young Freud was just like them. And they reminded him of who we has and who he had lost.
The purpose of a group is not to meet inner needs of the members. The purpose of the group is to catalyze community feeling and solidarity. The needs of the members being met is a secondary result of the community feeling being effectively cultivated. Community feeling is cultivated through the development and catalyzation process of offering one’s gifts and one’s self to the group as a comrade with the full trust that the group will offer something in return.
The only way out of codependency is to shift from “what can I get from this person?” to “what can I offer this person?” The antidote to codependency is comradeship.
No one heals or is healed by cutting open the same wound with a scalpel over and over again asking why it is not healing. And then blaming the person being cut open for the pain and terror they are feeling. I call this true injustice – epistemic injustice. It teaches a being in pain that it cannot and should not trust their own pain.
Someone, at some point, must bring the sword to cleave apart all the old systems, ways of relating, and structures of belonging that radically fail us all time and time if we are going to get out of this mess. Division must be created to facilitate us all seeing that we can walk the sun-drenched Buddha Fields with each other at any moment – any moment. When Jesus of Nazareth said he came to bring the sword and division, he wisely knew that you must divide people’s entire way of belonging to each other to open the space for the new types of community and belonging. Without it, who would risk the unknown of not belonging at all?
I have learned that for me, there is no greater hurt that shatters and destroys than reaching out for someone’s hand and finding no one there. Exploding stars emit less energy in their death throes than the catastrophe of the hand reaching for touch and finding only nothingness.
Do you want to be liked or do you want to be free? The choice is always yours. To cultivate the courage to be disliked, there must be a basis upon which to stand that both transcends us while rooting us into the ground that can hold us stable when the inevitable dislike and vitriol of others surges towards us. The larger community and being shared by nodes in The Net transcends any rejection or dislike. If you do not like me, it does not negate my existence as long as I am firmly rooted in the loving embrace of the universal community of all beings (the sangha).
