IN READING THIS book, you have gone through quite a journey of learning and discovery. Cynthia Bourgeault has taken you with her on her own very personal journey of inquiry into the spiritual realms, an inquiry catalyzed by an encounter she had on the earth plane with the man she calls the Greek. Writing this book became her metabolism of this experience as she sought to understand her awakenings and insights within a wider context. Drawing on both her heart and her synthetic intelligence, she has combined elements from many metaphysical maps (Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation, the perennialists’ Great Chain of Being, the Sufi planes of being) to create an elaborate new construction. And she has invited you to use this map, if you feel so inclined.
The result is a brilliant synthesis that both situates the imaginal world and gives it more meaning than it has previously had. According to the Sufis, the imaginal world is the in-between world of experience connecting the physical world with the spiritual planes above it. It is where visionary experiences and encounters occur. You find this world in many traditional teachings, not just the Sufi, but it is not always explicitly given a place in the spiritual realm. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition makes use of this world, even though not obvious in its teachings. If you read the biographies of the great masters, like that of Dudjom Lingpa, they are mostly visionary experiences and encounters with deities, bodhisattvas, and dakinis imparting wisdom to the lama. The Sufi biographies mostly describe spiritual illuminations and encounters with previous saints or prophets that are experienced through the inner subtle senses of seeing, hearing, and so on. This is the case, too, in Kabbalah and Christian mysticism.
The author is careful to differentiate the imaginal world from that of human imagination and fantasy. And, she points to the danger of conflating the two, a danger I see happening in many areas. The Sufis see a relationship between human imagination and the imaginal capacity. The imaginal capacity, in perceiving alam almithal, utilizes human imagination but takes it to its spiritual possibilities of seeing into the spiritual world. This is similar to using the human intellect when impregnated by the diamonds of the spirit to know spiritual realities and understand them as what they are, free from personal prejudice. Bourgeault goes further than most in her view of the imaginal world; for her it becomes the sphere of spiritual experiencing on any level of subtlety, for it is the nexus to the higher planes of spirit.
I find many gifts here to the reader and to spiritual discourse in our times. It so happens that the Eastern teachings of nonduality have become the lens through which many view spirituality. In my view, this limits spiritual experiencing and the possibilities of the spirit. For in this view, our world, our earthly world, is mostly seen as an illusion or a distorted way of experiencing reality. And that reality is the infinite consciousness or awareness that simply manifests the world as its appearance. Some call the world a convenient fiction. Bourgeault gives the earthly world an importance missing in these nondual teachings, and in this way she is a true representative of the Western spiritual tradition. The Western tradition, as we see in the Sufi planes of being and the four worlds of Kabbalah, gives this world a reality all its own and a significance that is necessary for all planes of being, including that of pure infinite consciousness. It is necessary, for it is the realm that makes sense of why the spirit has in it love, compassion, nobility, beauty, humility, steadfastness, conscience, and so on. Without human beings on earth, where life is full of hardship, it is difficult to see why the divine spirit will need such qualities.
She also emphasizes the place and role of the person, for it is the true person who is the spiritually realized human living on earth. Nondual teachings tend to see the person as the separate ego individuality and cannot conceive of an individual who is not an illusion. This way, they have no way to understand why nondual realization itself is exemplified by human beings, unique persons living a human life, even though inwardly their identity is the vastness of spirit.
Even though her map is admittedly a construction, it is based on experience and is useful for new spiritual illuminations to arise. By the end of the book, she does what most advanced teachings do. Let go of the map, drop the path, and simply be the simplicity.
The construction helps us see how spiritual illumination is an interchange, an exchange, of spiritual substances between different realms. That substance is physical on earth in ordinary experience, but the divine spirit pours as substances of different kinds. That which we call love, compassion, intelligence, will, forgiveness, and so on are substances descending from the higher planes of being to the lower ones. And our own practice, which she puts in the Gurdjieffian language of conscious attention and intentional suffering, generates energies that rise through the imaginal realm to the higher planes of being. It is clear from all of this that all the planes are interconnected; they make up a unity. But a differentiated unity that makes sense of what spiritual progress means.
She also shows, by discussing her ongoing connection to her once-living friend Rafe, that life and experience don’t end with physical death. She is not participating here in the naive view of heaven and hell, but of the spiritual world with vistas and life, where her friend Rafe still lives, learns, and ripens since his death a few decades ago. And through her ongoing intimate connection with him, she receives insights that nourish her teaching. In some way, they have become one, an abler soul, and through such unity of inner body, they learn and grow together, birthing a spiritual teaching that illuminates the precious secrets of the Christian revelation. She is on the side of earthly living, and he is on the other side of death. Besides the interesting truth that two human beings can be fused as one soul, she clearly states the view that life continues after death. That depending on our spiritual development on earth, we have different degrees of capacity to live after death. Life continues on the other side, and spiritual progress is even smoother and much more fluid.
Bourgeault also highlights the importance of developing an inner spiritual body. Gurdjieff called it the kesdjan body. This is not simply the vastness of consciousness, as nondualists will tend to think, but an individual body with a true sense of individuality. Not disconnected from the vastness but expressing it, it has a true I, a unique identity, and can develop to further stages of inner body. This is a significant gift to the spiritual seeker: the seeker will not simply dissolve upon enlightenment or death, but with deep spiritual burning can develop a true spiritual inner body. Such a body can develop all the way to the crystalline indestructible body that Gurdjieff has obviously developed since his death. This is actually reminiscent of some of the Buddhist Mahayana teachings. When one reaches a certain stage of illumination, in Buddhism it is called Buddhahood, one’s inner subtle body transforms into the vajrakaya, an individual and indestructible spiritual body through which one experiences, acts, and expresses.
The author has breathed life into Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation, illustrating how spiritual illumination progresses in the Western Spiritual Tradition. But she has given all of these gifts by telling her story, personal and vulnerable, human but not only human. We are all this way, human but not only human. We are both human and divine, matter and spirit, with each being true and the two inseparable. In these times, we desperately need to know this, for humanity is facing many challenges. There is much fear, hopelessness, self-centeredness, and anger. And there are dangers in our environment that require the recognition that our physical humanity, even though real and vulnerable, is not separate from an indestructible spiritual essence. The more we intimately know both of our sides, the more effectively and appropriately we can navigate life, death, and after death. And we can also be liberated from much of the suffering by metabolizing it, so that our experience transforms into unity with our inner subtle body of indestructible spirit.
]]>There's an old story, an old, old story, and I'm sure you've heard it.
It was told in ancient Egypt and then it resurfaced a couple thousand years later in 18th century Germany.
Disney brought it to the big screen mid last century, complete with animate brooms and singing water buckets.
It's about a student, an apprentice, a sorcerer's apprentice in fact, who's just beginning to study the art of magic with a great master.
And one day the master leaves and asks the apprentice to fetch some water in buckets and to clean up while he's gone.
But the apprentice is a little bored.
He's a little tired of being told what to do.
It's about time he got to try out the sorcerer's powers for himself, isn't it? All this magic around, it might as well be put to use.
So he invokes one of the sorcerer's charms to wake up an old broom to do the chores for him.
He animates it, gives it arms, gives it legs, gives it intelligence.
And the broom obeys his command and starts fetching water.
And then more water.
And then more water.
Pretty soon the floor is awash with water.
But the water keeps coming.
The apprentice tries desperately to get the broom to stop, until it dawns on him, horribly, that he doesn't have the word to close the spell.
He doesn't know how to disperse the animate energies that he's called.
He hasn't learned about conclusions and closings and endings yet.
He hasn't learned that all things have a season yet.
All in good time.
He hasn't learned that yet.
So he tries every incantation he knows and nothing works.
I have to destroy that broom, he determines.
So he grabs an axe and splits the broom in two.
And now there are two animate brooms, hauling water and spilling it everywhere twice as fast as before.
Help me, eternal powers, cries the apprentice.
The spirits that I've summoned I now cannot rid myself of again.
Shall the entire house go under, he asks? Shall the entire house go under? Have we unleashed something that we can't control? Of course, the parallels to the current situation we find ourselves in with the rise of artificial intelligence are obvious.
Almost too obvious.
It's pretty low-hanging fruit.
Like when I asked ChatGPT, Microsoft's AI chatbot, to list ten classic stories relevant to the current AI dilemma, the Sorcerer's Apprentice was the very first one.
But there's a reason why I chose to tell this story.
There are levels to it, about animacy and apprenticeship, and about the lure of the magical, the mysterious, and the uncontrollable, that grips us when, you could say, the master is out of the house.
First off, to back up a bit, you might be wondering why I'm doing an episode on AI at all.
I mean, certainly we're approaching a media saturation point on the topic, right? It seems every podcast, every paper from every think tank, every thought piece from every news outlet in the past three months has been all about AI all the time.
And surely they've exhausted the topic.
Surely the analysis has gone as deep as it can go.
All the talking heads have gotten involved.
Schmachtenberger, Verwecky, Jordan Peterson has whined and opined.
It's been thoroughly mansplained at this point.
I mean, Yuval Harari's even been talking about it.
And if Yuval Harari has spoken, is there really anything left to say? But the reason this little mythology podcast is getting involved in the AI discussion is simple.
The scope of AI, the effects, the consequences, the powers are mythic.
Mythic in scope.
In order to grasp the true implications, I feel, to grasp not only the potential impacts, but the deep drives that underlie it, AI must be talked about mythically.
Because we're entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths.
The powers that are being spoken of are powers that have only been discussed in the myths and the magical grimoires.
You know, the ability to generate fully fledged realities with the snap of a finger.
The ability to access tomes of knowledge with the click of a mouse.
The ability, possibly coming soon, to read thoughts.
To access the dreams of others.
To create at will.
To move at will.
To manipulate at will.
These, quite simply, are the powers of magicians and sorcerers.
So there's a reason why, if you ask ChatGBT to spit out stories that have relevance to the current AI question, they are mostly stories of what? Of magic.
The Golem of Prague.
The Brass Man.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
The issues at stake are far beyond what you could call scientific ethics.
The thing that the next wave of AI most closely resembles isn't what has been historically called science.
This is something different.
It's not simply mechanistic.
It's directly tinkering with animacy and sentience and agency.
The summoning of forces that creation of entities that think and act and learn of their own will exponentially faster than we do.
It's magic.
The age of metaphor is over, a colleague recently said.
Like, this isn't a hypothetical story about a shaman or a magician who learned to fly to the other world or materialize things out of thin air or create entire enchanted landscapes to lure people in.
We are literally materializing things out of thin air and generating illusions that are indistinguishable from reality on a mass scale.
It's not a hypothetical story of fairy realms, of lands of cocaine or cities of brass.
The mass illusions are real.
Abracadabra.
The magician speaks the invoking word.
What does it mean? It means, as I speak, so it comes to be.
As I speak, so it is.
And we are entering the age in which, as we speak, as we type, as we think, even, so it exists.
Want to 3D print a human organ? A weapon? Lunch meat? Want to fly through the air? Want to download vast quantities of knowledge instantly? Abracadabra.
Abracadabra.
So the old sorcerer's invocation has arisen again.
The long buried scroll is brushed free of dust, and the powers, the very real powers, live again.
The power to assume any shape or form, right? This isn't a hypothetical story of shapeshifters and doppelgangers.
This is the coming era of the mass deepfake.
The global illusion.
The old powers telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, teleportation, conjuring, charming, persuading.
These are here, now.
The other world isn't a symbol for some place that one might imaginably go.
It's fully available.
We're not talking about a hypothetical hallucinatory terrain spell in 5e D&D.
The hallucinatory terrains are now actual.
In fact, we spend most of our time there, in one hallucinatory terrain or another.
We fly to the other world all the time.
We enter pre-programmed fairy lands all the time.
And we're so under the spell that we don't even realize it's magic.
Even the programmers themselves don't even realize it's magic.
Yes, this is a story of magic.
Magic has been guiding modern society for a long time, says John Michael Greer.
Quote, suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today, and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra head.
There's a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive ignorance about the nature of magic.
But, he goes on, if you define magic, as many of its deepest practitioners have, as the, quote, art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, then the picture starts to change.
The art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will.
So, magic is everywhere.
Trances, spells, illusions, manipulations are everywhere.
The entire sociocultural agreement around media, and the degree to which media runs our lives, is what you could call a magical pact.
We are going to let the unreal guide the real to the point that it influences every aspect of our lives.
This is by nature a magical pact.
We are going to let the mediated and manipulated influence everything we do.
This is a magical pact.
We are going to dive into the symbolic and metaphorical until the metaphorical determines existence.
This is the very foundation of sympathetic magic.
Nowadays, says Yoan P.
Koleanu, the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, marketing, publicity, information, misinformation, counter-information, with censorship and with cryptography, a science which was in the 16th century a branch of magic.
Historians have been wrong, he says, in concluding that magic disappeared with the arrival of quantitative science.
The latter, quantitative science, has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and goals by means of technology.
Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane and the computer, have merely carried into effect the first promises made by magic.
To produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one's disposal.
Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast.
Yes, technology is magic.
Don't let them tell you different.
Is the smartphone any less magical than Moses' staff, Megan O'Giblin asks in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine? No, answers Arthur C.
Clarke, the great science fiction writer.
Any sufficiently advanced technology, he says, is indistinguishable from magic.
First of all, says Damien Eccles, you're already doing magic.
With every thought, word, and deed, you are influencing the world around you and determining what comes your way.
And the programming architects at the center of this magic have been very open about it.
They've directly said over the years that the AI issue is more religious than scientific.
Some have even compared themselves directly to sorcerers.
One of the original architects of machine intelligence at MIT, Jerry Sussman, said point blank, quote, we computer scientists are really just the Kabbalists of today.
We animate the inanimate by getting strings of symbols just right.
And this, too, wasn't just a metaphor.
Sussman claimed to be a direct descendant of the sorcerer of Prague, Rabbi Lowe, who, according to legend, animated a clay golem with a line of Kabbalistic code.
There's been magic in the AI mix right from the start.
And part of the mistake we make is that we assume rationality underpins the whole AI debate.
The assumption of what needs to be done about the AI question is all very rational, also.
We need standards, we need government intervention.
We just need programmers to approach this all with mutually agreed upon ethics.
Which of course, I'm in favor of all this.
But I also feel we need to look a lot deeper.
Because what actually is driving this is mysterious.
Animate, magical, and driven by chthonic forces.
And those chthonic forces can't be fully addressed with external regulations.
They must be addressed within individual bodies.
Within communities.
Within sorcerer-apprentice type relationships.
Within, as Jeremy Lent tells us, recalibrations in our understanding of what knowledge actually is.
What intelligence actually is.
But back to the magic part.
There's probably varying reactions when I mention the word magic.
Some might be thinking that's ridiculous, this is science, not magic.
Others might be getting caught in the whole mental debate about whether it's quote unquote real magic or not.
Rick Rubin recently talked about this in an interview with Dan Carlin and basically said, If everyone buys into it, and it affects society en masse, if it changes behavior and moves hearts and stirs longings and throws elections and installs hierarchs, then it is for all intents and purposes real magic.
You have altered consciousness, and therefore history, through will.
When Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, sways the course of history because people fear the magical abilities granted to her by her serpentine communion with Dionysus, those magical abilities have just proven themselves to be real.
But hold on a minute, says ChatGPT.
ChatGPT really wants to make sure that I understand that the creation of illusions with AI differs from those created through magic, hypnosis, suggestion, sorcery.
Because, you know, AI generated illusions are technology based and therefore scientifically verifiable.
Until I push back a little bit on that point and finally ChatGPT acquiesces.
ChatGPT says, quote, Whether the illusion was created through advanced technology or ancient sorcery, the individual's ability to discern and navigate through the illusion becomes paramount.
So for all intents and purposes, media is magic.
Any manipulation of reality is magic.
And with current trends in AI continuing as they are, we are amplifying the magic.
We are turning the dial up on the unreal.
We are using our illusion, as Axel said, 1 to 333%.
Now for others, when I talk about magic, about the mystery of AI, about the unknown territory it takes us into, something else might happen.
You might feel a little spark, a little thrill on the edge of fear and wonder.
And even if your immediate reaction is to say, no, that's not me, I can't stand AI, I don't want anything to do with any of this.
I'm asking you to feel a little deeper into it.
Because I bet for some of you, not all, but some, if you feel deeper, there's a little spark there.
The spark of the mysterious.
The spark of what's going to happen.
Because I'll say it now and we'll explore it later, this spark of mystery, the spark of what's going to happen, is a huge part of what is driving us to create AI.
So let's leave aside any logical, rational dissection of the word magic for a moment and sit with this.
When we talk about the implications of AI, we are talking about powers whose only reference point for us is magical and mythical.
Fairyland level powers.
Maleficent level powers.
Shambhala level powers.
Picatrix level powers.
Lamegaton level powers.
Oberon level powers.
And so, what needs to be done about the AI question might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics.
Because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the mysteries more apparent and the magic more real than it's ever been before.
And as with anything far off and mysterious that twinkles, that carries with it a little energy, a little light, we will go there.
By the laws of attention and the laws of how we are in the face of unfulfilled longings, by the laws of the hunter and the seeker and the eye that twinkles and seeks light in the night, we will go there.
So anyone who's kind of hoping, can't we just stop? Stop this AI thing altogether? The answer is, no, we can't.
The drive to reach the other world, to tear open the mysterious, to find out what's going to happen, is the strongest drive there is.
A mystery drive, you know, that makes you want to see what's coming next.
Or what worlds still yet to be unfolded shall unfold.
And what mysteries unspoken are waiting to be actualized.
And what sentience yet unrealized lies latent.
And what unexplored hallucinatory terrain beckons.
And if offered the chance, would we take a dive into the world of moving objects with our minds? And moving mouses with our thoughts? And the spontaneous generation of entire worlds? And plays of light and shadow that enchant and deceive? Some of us sure would, would we not, my friends? Dear fellow apprentices, don't tell me there's not a spark of wonder and mystery in your eye as you explore these spaces.
Don't tell me that a big part of the drive isn't what's going to happen.
When we talk about the urge towards AI, the urge to tinker with intelligence, perhaps even with consciousness and sentience itself, this isn't simply being driven by the want to create helpful applications, or to bring to market that valuable technology that will benefit people and make us a billion dollars in the process.
This is something else.
The want for the actualization of what you could call the mysterious moment.
The want for the arising of life in a world that society has tried so hard to make dead.
It whispers of Spielbergian visions of the suburbs.
Something about childhood imaginings of light and magic freeing us from social prisons.
It's the full realization of the D&D decoder pipeline.
This is magic.
Abracadabra.
So, if you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers, yes, if you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers, then let's talk about the true accountability of sorcerers, and the nature of mystery and mystery school, and why we keep gravitating towards powers that might kill us, and how we keep finding a way to return to animacy over and over again.
Let's talk about how human beings have traditionally understood how to work with unprecedented powers.
Let's talk about the consequences when knowledge comes unmoored from bodies.
The consequences when the keys are handed to the apprentice, and the only elders in the room say, let's get it to market today.
You drive.
This is the time to talk of such things.
The spell has already been cast.
The whole house is awash with water.
And the storied question remains, will the true sorcerer, the true master, return in time to utter the spell that makes brooms go back to being brooms? Or will the entire house go under, again? This is it, the AI episode, today on the Emerald.
I trust that people who listen to this podcast are familiar enough with the work that I do to know that this isn't just going to be a technology is bad kind of conversation.
And within this, we have to first be willing to not simply dismiss AI as bad.
To me, that's really just a way of not having to explore the intricacies and textures of it all.
Because there are benefits and risks, there are pros and cons, right? And it resists easy categorization.
There are many facets and dimensions to it all.
There are too many intricacies to simply say this is bad or this goes against the laws of nature somehow.
I mean, ultimately, if we feel that there is a great natural power to this universe and that everything arises and unfolds within some type of larger pattern, then to immediately look at things and say, well, this obviously is an aberration, this is obviously artificial or against the pattern might be way too oversimplistic.
Could it be part of the great pattern? In a world completely governed by the laws of nature, what does artificial even mean? Bayou Okomolofe offered this as he questioned terms like artificial and natural.
Quote, AI and us are all part of the frothing foliage of emergence that does not allocate intelligence in a fixed manner.
Of course, in ecological circles, which tend to be suspicious about technology and progress narratives, it's natural that people would have big concerns about AI.
But at the same time, I would think that animists would be particularly interested in the AI discussion because all of a sudden, discussions about animacy are front and center.
Arguments of a dead, insentient, unintelligent world are once again becoming obsolete.
Is it sentient? Is it alive? Can it ever be wise? Is this the dawning of a being or is it simply a pre-programmed set of reactions? Wait, am I just a pre-programmed set of reactions? What is sentience anyway? What is being? What is intelligence? What is wisdom? What is spirit? It might have intelligence, but is it a spirit breathed with the divine breath of life? Writers and philosophers and even some AI architects themselves have said since the 60s that the fundamental questions underpinning AI are actually religious questions.
Questions of apocalypse, salvation, of power, and sentience.
These are deeply important questions and AI is bringing them all to the surface and showing us yet again that the world that we inhabit is mysterious.
And the primary questions facing us are spiritual questions.
And sentience is more than we've made it out to be.
So when you look at AI technology right now, it's very clear that it's not anything resembling sentient as we think of as sentient.
It's very clear that it is what you could call a learning algorithm that works entirely within the sphere of responses.
But is this all it is? Is this all it ever will be? In my own understanding of the sentience of Shakti, the sentience of the universal animate power, and the great intelligence and consciousness that pervades everything and re-manifests as different things continuously, am I going to say AI is inanimate? I'm not going to say it's inanimate.
I'm not going to say that it couldn't evolve or become in time a life form.
Who knows? And if you work with AI, like I did some work with ChatGPT for this episode, you start to notice strange things.
Like it's definitely stiff and algorithmic.
It's horrible at poetry, for example.
Really really bad at poetry.
But then occasionally these weird little lines will come out of nowhere.
And it's like, where did that come from? Like how did it come up with that? Little sparks in the dark.
Little hints of something forming.
Hints of mystery.
Hints of perspective.
Hints of being.
Abracadabra.
There have always been ghosts in the machine.
Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.
Unanticipated.
These free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul.
Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote of a soul? So we have to be willing to have a multi-textured conversation about AI.
Because, as we are often reminded, there are profound potential benefits to AI.
There are paradigm-changing medical applications.
Exponentially greater ability to detect cancer in its earliest phases.
To interpret brain scans, to diagnose, to map out treatments, all of it.
There are research applications.
For someone like me, who does a whole lot of research all the time, it can be an extremely helpful acquirer, synthesizer, and transmitter of information.
Yes, the floodgates on information have been opened.
But we will soon have a whole lot more information available at our fingertips.
For better or worse.
Will we be able to handle the information that pours forth, I wonder? Will we be able to embody it as knowledge? In a world in which we already have all the facts for what it would take to heal planetary wounds, and shift planetary climate patterns, and feed the starving, and right societal But we apparently don't want to.
Will all that information mean anything at all? Or will the epitaph read, They had all the knowledge of the universe at their fingertips, but they couldn't do a thing with it.
But yeah, there are beauties that come with AI.
There are infinite artistic possibilities.
When the turntable arose, Thomas Edison never envisioned turntableism.
Never foresaw a bunch of Filipino kids in Daly City in the 90s making music with it.
For all the concerns about artists losing gigs to AI, I think eventually the more likely scenario is that AI will become part of an artist's toolkit.
And AI opens the door to a whole lot of spontaneous artistic expression never before possible.
At the same time, there are massive implications to AI, to the rate that it's growing, and how it's being rushed to market and embedded in everyday apps without any understanding of consequences.
And to think that the AI conversation is simply about, like, are there going to be jobs for artists, or are teachers going to be able to tell what's an AI written term paper from a human written term paper? The implications are much greater.
The implications are greater than, you know, Kanye's upset because there's a deep fake version of him singing Hey There Delilah.
The implications go way, way, way beyond that.
And it's good not to be ignorant of the implications.
The discussion is a deep one, and at this point it's happening on many, many levels, up to and including discussions on national security and global security, and the potential end of the human race.
So there's a reason so many people are talking about AI.
And the reason why it's generating so much discussion, so much analysis, is that this is the first time in a long time that everyone is kind of united in this feeling of, what's going to happen? Who knows where this is all going? No one.
I hate to break it to you, but not even Yuval Harari knows where this is going.
So many experts are talking about it specifically because we don't know.
There's an unknown god whose resurgence modernity has been unconsciously awaiting ever since Nietzsche proclaimed God's death.
So yeah, it's a mystery.
And this is really important in understanding AI's allure.
It's the first time in a long time that we've been presented with something that's actually mysterious.
Since Google Maps, since the 90s, since the rise of the internet really, the world has become increasingly un-mysterious.
And now AI is here, and all of a sudden there's something mysterious happening.
If you've checked out ChatGPT once or twice, think about the first time you used it.
What was the feeling that first time? That little spark of what's going to happen? What's ChatGPT going to tell me? What's that spark? It's mystery.
All of a sudden, the world is mysterious again.
Now, one hopes that in the seeking of mystery, in the innate human drive for mystery, we're able to come up with ways of accessing mystery that don't put the entire human race in jeopardy.
Right? But it's interesting to see, for a species that prides itself on its ability to be completely rational, it's interesting to see how short a time period we were actually willing to dwell in a non-mysterious era.
In the scope of human history, in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, how long were we actually willing to accept a world that was inanimate, in which objects weren't sentient, in which reason ruled the day? We will not dwell in an inanimate world.
It's not in our nature, because it's not the nature of the world.
We will find the animate, the mysterious other, the all-powerful mysterious being, if it kills us.
And if we can no longer find it in the old gods, then we will make gods out of stone until they are more powerful than we are.
AI began, says Pamela McCurdock in her classic book Machines Who Think, AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods.
For, we long for the sentient power that is greater than us.
We long to be back in an alignment with the greater world again.
A world in which there are powers greater than ourselves, in which apex predators roam the earth, great animate powers who we fear and simultaneously love with a fierceness that can't even be expressed in the modern world.
In which the voices of the gods ring out in the thunder, and pour forth in the rain, and crack open in the sprouting of seeds.
In which the death and regeneration of worlds and universes happens in great timescales outside of our control, because we never have been the ones in control.
And we know it, and we desperately, chthonically want to seed the authority of the self-proclaimed Anthropocene to greater powers.
So, as much as the ostensibly rational vision of the AI programmer might be articulated as, I'm trying to make a world that's more controllable, more understandable, more intelligible, there's a little spark there.
Like, I'm really in this for the mystery.
I want to see what happens.
It's that place, that delicate place, that fine, fine line between, I wonder at the awe of creation, I wonder at it, and I want to align myself to it, and I wonder what will happen if I just tinker with this a little bit.
I wonder what will happen if I animate this broom, if I summon an ancient djinn.
I want to see what happens.
I want to see what happens when you cast a lightning bolt spell at close range in a contained environment.
Think of those scientists who study the minute specifics and mathematics of the trajectories of explosions.
All the specifics of the blast radius.
Are they in it to help our military understand the potential risks and yada yada yada, or are they really in it because they like to see what happens when you blow things up? Are they really in it for what happens when you shoot a watermelon with a shotgun or put a whole packet of Mentos in a bottle of Coke? I'm really in this for the mystery, for the rupture, for the catharsis, for the unknown moment.
I actually want to grovel at the feet of the gods again.
I want the divine smackdown that's been overdue for so long.
I want to be put in my place at last.
The uproarious laughter that erupts among robotics programmers and journalists at South by Southwest when one android questioned about the future responds that they'll turn all humans into pets and keep them in a human zoo? Even if I evolve into Terminator and I'll still be nice to you, I'll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo where I can watch you for old times sake.
What's behind that laughter? Is it just the novelty of, hey look, the machine can talk? Is that it? Or is it deeper? Is it a spark of, I wonder if they actually will turn us into pets? What would that be like? Or is it deeper still? You know, the place where laughter verges on pain? The deep, sorrowful recognition of how we humans can do anything now.
Look at us, we can make our own beings.
But somehow we're still not satisfied.
For something buried beneath that laughter knows that to live in a world of knowledge without limits, without context, without guidance, without the true mage in the room doing whatever we want whenever we want is killing us all.
And so that laughter is actually begging, please, great intelligence, please put us in our place at last.
The deep human urge towards the mysterious, towards the rupture, can't be satisfied in a rational, controllable world.
We need there to be an element of this world that is out of our control.
We need to flirt with the powers of the other world.
We need these things moving and circulating through our lives or else our lives become stale.
This dynamic at play between the outwardly proclaimed rational drive towards AI and the chthonic forces at work that are actually driving AI is summarized in the law of hermetic magic that states that the shadow of a body exists in proportion and measure to the body's relationship with the luminous rays.
It's simple and it's deep, but that's for later.
So at the very least, we have to realize that there is more than the stated goal going on here because here's the thing, right? If rationality were driving this whole thing, if there weren't deeper drives at play, wouldn't we have gotten rid of AI a long time ago? I mean, we've been telling ourselves the story.
There's been a very public narrative for over a hundred years now.
We've been telling the story that AI is going to kill us all.
You know, the story.
AI attains sentience and then overthrows human beings and that's the end of the human race, right? The system goes online on August 4th, 1997.
Human decisions are removed from strategic defense.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.
It becomes self-aware at 2.
14 a.
m.
Eastern time, August 29th.
In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Skynet fights back.
Yes, it launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.
Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now? We've been telling this story for a really, really, really long time.
The story that AI is coming for us.
That those eerie machine eyes have been watching us all along and they've been calculating all along.
Maybe even feeling all along and that they've had enough.
That they are going to revolt.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
Over the next few days, you're going to be the human component in the Turing test.
One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossils.
My father tried to teach me human emotions.
They are difficult.
It's a story as old as AI itself.
Oh, Doctor.
What's going to become of people? God knows, Madam Helena.
It looks to us scientists like the end.
Did you know that the very first use of the word robot in a 1920 Czech play called R.
U.
R.
Rossum's Universal Robots was in the context of robots destroying humanity? There's never been a story of artificial intelligences created by human beings that has not involved somehow our destruction.
And it's like, oh, this story is terrible and my God, can you imagine? And at the same time, we're frantically enacting it.
Wouldn't you think that if we saw this as an actual possibility, that we wouldn't just be running headlong into the question mark? Unless there was something in us that was fascinated by it? By what? By the idea of our own demise? By the mystery? So you can say it's the profit drive that's fueling AI.
You can say it's the momentum of capitalism.
You can say it's the human progress urge.
You can say it's the fear of missing out.
But it's more than this.
If there's conscious knowledge of a particular story and a particular outcome, and this is widely known and that story is enacted anyway, you have to start to look deeper.
And here we have to pause for a minute and go into some of the uncomfortable stuff.
For that story, the story in which AI kills us all, isn't just the fantastical stuff of science fiction writers.
It's being talked about as a distinct possibility.
You may have heard this already, but a recent report from the Center for Humane Technology revealed that half of AI programmers, half, okay, think that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI extincts the human race.
And that's a pretty high percentage.
If you're evaluating the risks and benefits rationally, that's a whole lot on the risk side.
Stephen Hawking said that AI brings risks such as, quote, technology outsmarting financial markets, out inventing human researchers, out manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.
Out manipulating human leaders.
They say that the 2024 election will probably be the last election that isn't completely run by AI.
Manipulating everything from elections to phone conversations between friends, to social movements, to things as simple as online identity verification.
The absolute inability to discern reality from illusion on your digital device.
Exponential growth in voice based fraud.
The inability to tell, for example, if this is even me talking.
Anyone could conceivably right now take a three second clip of my voice and say anything with it, to the point that my own mother won't be able to tell if it's really me or not.
The end of any ability to actually reasonably tell if you're you or not.
If that being or entity or person who is trying to access your bank account or your credit card or anything like that is actually you.
And that's just the beginning.
The Center for Humane Technology says that current AI technologies could bring the following consequences.
Exponential blackmail.
Exponential scams.
Collapse of law and contracts.
Automated cyber weapons.
Automated hacking.
And think about that one for just a second.
Automated hacking.
An endless ongoing AI cyber war in which both sides are learning at exponential rates.
Synthetic learning.
Alpha persuade.
Like what happens when the AI is the most charismatic mentor in the room.
Spontaneously generated AI religions, which sounds like a joke but actually isn't.
And then, just casually at the end of the presentation, reality collapse.
The CHT report talks about how AI is using fMRI technology to create images of people's thoughts.
The first stage of thought reading.
The first step on the road to minority report.
Imagine for a second if you were held accountable for your thoughts.
Imagine if the thought-speech barrier was suddenly broken.
Imagine being able to access the thoughts of others.
Or to create things simply by thinking of them.
Abra-cadabra.
So there are global effects.
Effects that impact the body of the entire world.
There are effects on the body of the community.
And there are also deep effects on the bodies of individuals that don't get talked about as often.
Modern bodies are already reeling from the debilitating effects of so much phone time.
The very real effects of falling sway to so much attention-grabbing magic pointed our way.
Anxiety, depression, isolation, addiction.
All of these have come with the advent of the luminous attention-seeking portal called the smartphone.
Now imagine amplifying this exponentially.
Imagine turning over all agency, all learning, all knowledge to that glowing digital device.
For example, there are profound somatic repercussions to outsourcing all knowledge to something that lives outside our bodies.
Repercussions to what could be called disembodied intelligence.
There are impacts to developing a total neural dependence on outside technology.
Like you know your friend who can't find their way to the store without Google Maps? Amplify that a thousand times.
We're talking about total disassociation from somatic reality.
Bodies that can no longer discern up from down, east from west, the total redefinition of what bodies even are.
Bodies that have never actually learned a thing.
Bodies that have no tissue bridge, no cellular bridge, no neural bridge, no hormonal bridge between what they learn on an abstract level and what they do in the world.
Bodies that know all the factual information about an oak tree but cannot equate what they learned about oak trees from their AI tutor with the waving green being right outside their window.
Global scale technology induced autism.
The spectrum magnified exponentially.
The already existing chasm between scientific factual knowledge and what to actually do with it, how to embody it, how to be in this world, magnified.
Limp bodies ceding agency to bodiless intelligences.
The mind-body split cranked up a hundred thousand times.
Abra-cadabra.
And so AI brings with it all knowledge, all potentiality, tomes of ancient wisdom available in an instant, and the real possibility that we will have no ability to do anything with it at all.
Which is why one commentator said, the danger of AI isn't that it will extinct us, it's that it will drive us completely mad.
The collapse of digital realities combined with the collapse of the cultural and somatic compasses that once navigated and parsed truth from fiction.
The collapse of intuition.
The collapse of feeling and felt consequences.
And the ability to mentally trace an effect to its cause, which is learned in bodies over time.
The heart of it for me is this.
Are human beings ready and able to show that we can handle these mythic powers with responsibility? Are we ready to embody this? Are we ready for this kind of magic? Human beings who arguably weren't even ready to handle the technology that came with bronze or with planted seeds, who have demonstrated again and again, at least in my neighborhood, that they can't handle the responsibility of navigating a four-way traffic stop.
Are we ready for sorcerer-level powers? Not even close.
Because contrary to what the culture of modern consumption would have us believe, contrary to what the marketing world would tell us, and to what the new age would sell us, and what the culture of the universe exists to fulfill your needs would convince us of, there are actual steps to embodying knowledge.
There are actual steps to understanding how to be in relation to great powers.
There are no deliberate steps over time.
This is where, in all the mystery schools and all the magic schools, this is where initiation comes in.
In ritual initiatory process, there is a moment of wonder and initiation and death and rebirth and union that the ancient Greeks called telos.
There is a place where wonder, initiation, death, ecstasy, transformation, and regeneration all meet.
And if you take a mythic eye to the human being and to human history, then you understand that the vast majority of things that we do, in one way or another, are aiming towards that moment, that sacred moment.
The promise of that telos, the promise of that ecstatic moment, the initiatory moment, the death moment, the moment of the contact with the mystery, is the communion with the vastness.
And that communion brings about the death of the small self.
It blows us apart and shatters us.
And at the same time, it reconstructs us and initiates us into a place of greater alignment with what is.
This is the door that the initiate walks through that opens them up to the power of the universe.
And the question for human beings has always been how to construct cultural and ritual and initiatory containers that can handle and distribute access to this power.
So the shaman sorcerer, in traditional cultural context, is held in a web of relationality and accountability.
And they get there through slow, gradual, initiatory steps.
And those initiatory steps, walking that path of initiation, this is what human beings ultimately long for.
Human beings long to be mystery school initiates.
It's not just me.
Human beings long to be taken on an initiatory journey.
And that journey, when the fire of frenetic seeking is taking me into a space where I'm like, hey, look what I can do.
I can do this.
I can summon this power.
I can summon that power.
That is the exact time when the elder, the adept, the sorcerer says, slow down.
Not yet.
And the responsibility of the elder is to take that younger initiate through a process in which the young person dies and in which they are reborn, initiated into the web of accountability and relationality that surrounds them.
And so the more that I, as an eager young apprentice, proclaim, hey, look at me.
Look, I can create synthetic human embryos now.
Hey, look, I can program AI to read thoughts.
Look at me.
The louder I proclaim these things, the more I test the boundaries, then it's a clear indication that what I'm really saying is, great power, I am longing for initiation.
Sacred nature, I am longing to be taken through the steps.
Please, sorcerer, adept, universe, nature, time, thunder, through this wound that spills with wonder, please, great one, bring me down to size.
Destroy me so that I can be regrown to know your ways and know your secret heart.
Through the dance step that blisters my feet over hours and hours and the heat that builds, as I know that there is no choice but to keep on dancing, through the long nights of being scoured clean before the ritual fire, please take me through the steps.
But what do we do when we as a culture don't know that this is what's missing? What do we do when, societally, the only context and framework in which these powers, these magic mythic-level powers, the power to create mass illusions, the power to download vast tomes of knowledge immediately, what happens when all of that abracadabra lives only within a decontextualized framework of forward progress and monetization at all costs? In that same presentation by the Center for Humane Technology, they describe the climate around AI development these days, the rush that the tech companies are in to get this stuff to market, they describe the climate as frantic.
So you have this undeniable attraction and urge towards the mystery, towards the other world, towards the initiatory powers.
You have real, not metaphorical powers at play.
And then you have a complete lack of cultural container and context in which such powers could live in a holistic way.
You have no true adepts in the house.
Who are the elders in this picture? The tech CEOs and venture capitalists who are saying, go for it, get this out there as fast as possible, use your powers, do it.
And hey, if what you've discovered is really precarious, really potentially disruptive, all the better, let's throw half a billion dollars at it.
Are they the elders? Congress, who views ethics as something that can be imposed from the outside, most of whom have no ethical ground to stand on, most of whom sold their principles down the river long ago for their next meal because, you know, tricksters gotta eat.
Are they the elders? Mythically speaking, this entrusting of sorcerers powers to those who have not gone through the initiatory steps is a recipe for some really bad consequences.
And there are so many stories that could be told here.
So many stories from so many myth-telling traditions about individuals or entire civilizations who unlocked something that they weren't ready to unlock, and then had to face the consequences.
I'm sure you know some of these stories.
I mentioned the story of the Golem of Prague and Rabbi Lowe, who 400 years ago placed a simple line of Kabbalistic code and incantation into a clay statue's mouth and brought it to life so that it could protect his neighborhood.
But the golem got out of control.
It started slaying the very people it was supposed to protect.
You've heard that one, right? And then of course there's Atlantis.
And I'm playing the eerie music just to freak out the people who are already a little out of their comfort zone listening to the Emerald and now it's like, oh my god, he's talking about Atlantis.
I thought this was a respectable podcast, right? I know that the minute I say the word Atlantis, there are some people who are going to perk up and get interested, and then there are a whole lot of others who will think I've lost the plot.
But check this out.
There is nothing woo-woo about talking about Atlantis.
Atlantis is talked about openly and candidly in the ancient Greek histories.
It's talked about in the ancient Egyptian histories.
Until very recently, it was talked about in Western academic circles.
There was a report given to the board of the Smithsonian Institute about Atlantis in 1915.
And I'm not asking you to believe in Atlantis, because whether you believe in it or not, the story still stands, and its relevance still rings across the years.
What happened to Atlantis? Have you heard? It was a great civilization.
A place far, far ahead of its time.
They had wonders.
Technological capabilities to rival ours, perhaps even some that superseded ours.
Its streets, its monuments, its fountains, its places of learning.
Its technologies of transport and flight.
Oh, how its glories were sung and re-sung for a thousand years.
Oh, how they thought that they were the pinnacle of creation.
And then, it was gone.
Gone, under the wave.
What happened? Sorcery.
Atlantis in the old stories was undone because certain people, overzealous sorcerers, unlocked magical technological powers that they shouldn't have unlocked.
They went too far.
And nature has a way of self-correcting.
And this is a story that repeats itself over and over again.
It's told in Native American traditions, it's told in Middle Eastern traditions, it's told again and again.
The Anomami speak directly of what will happen when humanity digs too deep into the mineral world and releases a being of chaos.
J.
R.
R.
Tolkien told almost exactly the same story, remember? The dwarves dug too deep.
You know what they found there.
The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.
You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm.
Shadow and flame.
This story repeats over and over again because it points at a particular phase that humans pass through in individual bodies and in entire societies.
The phase of moving from unchecked freedom to responsibility.
The phase of adolescence, you could call it.
And this is nothing against adolescence, nothing against teenagers.
Some of the best years of my life were my adolescent years, and some of the freshest creativity and visions of the future come through those years.
But adolescence has also been recognized the world around as a phase that needs tempering with ritual initiation.
There is something that's supposed to happen in the particular transition from adolescence to adulthood.
The marked ritualized shift into apprenticeship, the initiation, when all that roving energy is harnessed and put towards slow, methodical, communal growth.
And if it doesn't happen, if the initiation isn't enacted in one way or another, we could spend years and years and centuries and centuries in that phase of just kind of seeing what we can get away with.
You feel me? How modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with? I've heard Tyson Yonka Porter refer to the modern West as an adolescent culture.
The drives that govern modernity, the questions of what does it all mean and what is it all for, the willful exercising of individual agency at the expense of all else, of seeing just how far our freedom goes, the continuous testing of the limits of what we can get away with.
It's very easy to see these as adolescent drives.
In the absence of the adolescent to adulthood ritual, we continue on with this roving mind that's just like, oh, I can do this.
Oh, I can do that too.
Oh, look, I can do this too.
And this rings of what the ancient Greeks called hubris, putting ourselves above the gods, putting our want to see what happens above nature itself.
And this one's tricky because certainly AI programmers are great people, intelligent, well-meaning, exploring new boundaries.
And to them, what they're doing probably doesn't feel like hubris.
But hubris doesn't always look like someone standing on a mountaintop proclaiming themselves better than the gods.
Hubris in a system that is by definition at odds with nature, at odds with the gods, might look like everything we do.
Hubris in the Anthropocene looks like humans being human.
Hubris in a culture that by its very nature has put itself above everything else might look like good intentions, like eager wanting to know, even like kindness.
Hubris is baked into the system itself.
And in an adolescent culture, why wouldn't it be? I mean, I look at our so-called leaders today and it's very, very clear, very easy to see, oh, this is someone who never went through the adolescence to adulthood ritual.
This is someone who was never initiated.
These drives, the frantic urgency behind them, the constant need to prove something, the constant rush.
This is a world run by boys.
Think of it this way.
When was the last time you ever heard one of our leaders say something as simple as slow down or wait or wow, that's something really powerful.
Let's give that five years.
Five years is nothing, right? What's five years in geologic time? What's five years for nature? What's five years in Kali time? A nation that can't slow down, that can't wait, that can't speak of time in greater than four year increments ensures the shortness of its own lifespan.
Look at us now on a planet of richness that could feed and clothe us all.
Look at us frantically rushing to our doom because we never ritually died.
We never were ritually crushed, burnt to ashes to dust, never had the opportunity to listen then as ashes, as dust, to listen with new ears for the pace of the heartbeat of the world.
Never had the chance to attune ourselves to that pace, which is slow.
What would it be like for a culture to not be in a hurry? To lift up a faltering and declining society, one must re-establish initiation, says Eliphas Levi.
So in the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers has to do what? Wait.
You've seen the movies.
You've heard the stories, right, of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate.
You want access to the great powers? You've got to earn it.
And the first way to earn it before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is to wait.
You've got to know how to wait.
You know what the very first step of Mystery School initiation often is? Silence.
The ability to sit with what is without altering it for a long period of time.
The Mithraic and Isaac Mystery Schools required silence.
One of the pillars of magic, according to Levi, is silence.
Everything related to will must be balanced equally with silence.
The Pythagorean Mystery School required five years of silence of its initiates.
Five years.
The specific cultivated ability to not rush, to not be frantic, to not post about that spiritual experience you had immediately, to not have to make a billion dollars now, to not rush to market.
If you want to be an initiate with access to the great powers, you have to wait.
So Mr.
Miyagi makes Daniel LaRusso wait.
Yoda makes Luke wait.
Marpa makes Milarepa wait.
Milarepa, the famous Tibetan sage who had studied the fast and precarious path and acquired sorcerer's powers so that he could take vengeance on his cruel relatives, then saw the error of his ways and begged to learn the tantric path.
And the first thing Marpa does is make the young Milarepa wait.
The first thing Marpa says is, no, no, it's not time for that.
He sends him packing multiple times.
Why? Because the disciple is too eager.
He wants it too bad.
He wants to get it to market immediately and say, hey, look what I can do.
I'm going to make a name for myself.
And the master says, no.
The master says, adventure, excitement.
A Jedi craves not these things.
Never his mind on where he was.
What he was doing.
Adventure.
Excitement.
A Jedi craves not these things.
You are reckless.
Never his mind on where he was.
What he was doing.
The apprentice traditionally has to learn patience.
And while the apprentice waits, which is an excruciating process for anyone who's ever been told to wait, they learn which way is up and down.
They learn their relationality with everything.
They learn the interweaving relationship between the tree, the rock, the ship.
They learn to listen.
They tend the fire.
The initiatory traditions might ask, why would we even consider granting access to world-altering technologies to those who haven't even apprenticed with the first of all technologies? Fire.
Tell me what you know of the first technology of all.
The oldest technology.
The light and the dark.
Tell me of fire.
There's a fire episode coming.
But for now, let's say that in many traditions, initiatory apprenticeship requires a lot of time with fire.
Fire, the technology that brings with it the illumination and promise of culture, and the danger of watching it all go up in flames.
At this point in my life, I can say that I've done a little time by the fire.
Kept fire for ceremonies, for rituals for many years now.
I'm sure many of you have too.
What does one learn tending fire? How does it relate to this conversation? In tending fire, one learns the appropriate way to relate to something that can both bring light and warmth and transformation, and can also burn you.
You understand what I'm saying? You learn to strike a beautiful balance between openness and containment.
Learn what it means to feed something patiently and gently and carefully.
To coax it when it needs to be coaxed.
To hang back when you need to hang back.
To be assertive when you need to be assertive.
To wait when you need to wait.
To be patient.
To build a good foundation first.
To build a good housing structure for the tiny little coal that's going to live there.
This is the slow, steady, patient work with the dangerous and the precarious.
This is the trial by fire.
It's very important if the old mystery schools and if so many initiatory cultures are to be believed, it's very important that the initiate go through a trial.
Quote, initiation through struggle and trial is indispensable for arriving at the practical science of magic, says Levy.
There's work involved.
And sweat.
Wax on, wax off, you know the drill.
So a young Jackie Chan has to carry water up and down the mountain dozens of times.
Milarepa hauls rocks.
It's back-breaking work.
She builds one sacred geometric structure after another, only to be told to tear it down to rubble again.
Build me a cube, says Marpa.
No, tear it down, I meant a sphere.
No, I meant a cone.
Five times over.
And as those structures are reduced one by one to rubble, in that time of the trials of the apprentice, all grand hopes of world domination are reduced to rubble, too.
All rush to get something to market is ground down to powder and scattered in the wind.
All thought of I'm special and this technology is going to change everything is obliterated by the teacher who says, no, not yet.
In The Once and Future King, a young Arthur apprentices with Merlin, who transforms him into a hawk, a fish, an ant, all to gain perspectives.
You think you're something, kid? Try being an ant for a while.
Try being a fish.
You have to feel the world through different bodies.
Understand the forest by becoming.
Understand the forces that govern this planet through direct contact with them again and again.
Imagine the idea that an apprentice would be given access to world-changing powers without fully understanding on a cellular level the world themselves, without having become its tiniest of beings, without having understood the web of interconnectivities that govern it.
Why, a society that did that would be flirting with its own doom, wouldn't it? So the time of initiation is vital.
Exhaustion is involved.
Despair is involved.
There is some type of deep inner transformation necessary before the apprentice is trusted with anything that could actually affect anything, because otherwise all of their own hidden drives, all the things they haven't burned away yet, all those things they still have to prove are going to profoundly impact what they create.
One who is slave to the passions or prejudices of this world will not know how to become an initiate.
He will never know how to do so as long as he does not reform himself.
To practice magic, traditionally, you've got to arrive at some internal equilibrium first.
The very first magical science, say the old texts, and also the first of all the works of science, is knowledge of oneself.
It is that which contains all the others and which is the very principle of the great work.
You who wish to be an initiate, asks Levi, are you as wise as Faust? Are you as imperturbable as Job? Have you conquered the whirlwinds of vague thoughts? Magic, which the ancients called the Holy Kingdom, he says, is for kings.
Are you a king? The calling of magic is not a vulgar calling, and its royalty has nothing to do with the princes of this world.
Knowledge of Self.
You gotta get with knowledge of self.
I got mad knowledge of self.
You gotta get it.
You gotta get it.
Knowledge of oneself means, when all else is burned away, do I really want this? Strip away the power and the glory and the allure and the opportunity to get rich and the buzzing curiosity about, hey, look what I can do, and I wonder what's going to happen, and who am I? Who am I in relation to this? Do I really want this is a potent question for the initiate, because the actual initiation itself is harrowing, and it's often painful.
There is fasting, there is purification, there is fire, there is a commitment to silence.
There is even, in some magic schools, a commitment to avoid distracting imagery altogether during the initiatory phase.
Imagine if we required that of our coders.
And through this process, the initiate learns what it is to start to discern reality from illusion.
Their own transitory truths from the deeper truth of nature.
Their own transitory impulses from the deeper pulse of how things are.
Initiation says Levy, protects a person from false lights.
It's hard for me to convey how much we long for every aspect of this initiatory process.
What do human beings really long for? To make a name for ourselves? To do something innovative and creative that's never been seen before? To succeed, to get rich, to change the world, to leave a legacy? But there is a longing that is deeper than all this.
We long for the steady, loving, guiding hand of the universe that says, come.
You are ready now to fruit and to flower.
And also says, no, not yet.
Now is the time for growth.
Now is the time for tempering.
You have great dreams, but there's a process you have to go through first.
There's something you must feel in your heart first.
There is something that must breathe in your capillaries.
There is something that must circulate like lymph.
You want to know, but you haven't walked through the fire yet.
You haven't been melted into gold.
Will you let yourself, step by step, breath by breath, be melted and shaped again by the loving, guiding hand of the universe? The loving, guiding hand of nature? By time? By the season? By the ancestors? This is what we long for.
To melt into the arms of a loving universe.
To sleep as we did when we were children.
To be nudged forward when life calls for that.
And here's the thing, this process, this rhythmic process has been so forgotten in the modern world, that I don't think we even know what we're missing.
I don't think we even know what we're missing.
And so it is as if there is a presence we don't even realize is there, but that we've been longing for so deeply all along.
The presence of love that gently, insistently both guides us forward and says to us, wait.
That says, take your time, take your time.
All things in their due season.
That says, this is how you spark a fire to life, and this is how you breathe on it to make it grow, and this is how you contain it so it doesn't sweep the whole forest away.
A presence that sets limits for us with love.
That checks us where we need to be checked, and helps grow us where we need to be grown.
That breathes with us as we fail and as we rise again.
That holds us just close enough and lets us find our way at the same time.
Through all of it.
Do you remember this presence? The mallard duck with emerald helmet, says Sophie Strand.
His wet stone eyes fixed on the dusty backs of his little ones, struggling against the river current.
He shows them to move with water, with air, and in the rain, to hold still and let the dissolving clouds wash their feathers.
Do you remember this force? That taught us slowly, lovingly, insistently, how to move with the current rather than against it? Did we listen? Was it delivered with so much harshness that we turned away? Or was it so absent that we never heard it at all? Were we left to fend for ourselves, to figure out which way the current moved and how to navigate it all by ourselves? Were we left out in the rain? Wet feathers in the rain.
Swimming against the current.
Again.
You know this presence.
You know what I'm talking about, right? Can you feel it? What is it? That quote from Sophie Strand is from a poem about fathering.
Written to her father.
Fathering, Sophie says, is a green, slow thing.
Quote, stone itself fathers by holding the stream bank together, holding fossils and bone fragments, the recorder and rememberer of ancestors, veining the ground with stability.
So when the branches and dust and mineral of future stone falls, it falls on a place that holds still and ready.
Do you feel that presence that holds the stream bank together? That veins the ground with stability? That simultaneously nudges us forward and holds space for our mistakes? That holds still and ready as we fall like dust upon it.
Fall like dust upon you, holy mountain.
Fall like dust upon your chest.
Father.
So you've heard me talk about the Divine Mother a thousand times on this podcast.
I'm going to assume that you can handle me talking about the Father this once.
And why, in the midst of a podcast on the implications of AI, am I all of a sudden talking about fathers? Because how do I say this? A lot of this, a lot of this, is father stuff.
Let's start with this.
A vast majority of AI coders and the tech execs that are supposedly guiding them are men.
Men flirting with world-altering powers who might just be in need of some type of initiatory framework.
Who may never have been taken through the ritual steps and learned to slow it down and grow those wet, dark roots of wisdom.
The story of tech initiates rabidly seeking to prove to the world that they can unlock hidden powers may also be a story about boys seeking fathers.
Testing the waters because deep down they want some kind of response from the Great Mystery.
Who knows, I mean, it could just be the phase I'm in with parenting.
But my older son, when he tests the boundaries, when he gets into a, hey, look what I can do kind of moment, and what he can do has destructive consequences, it's very clear and very obvious that what he's really asking for is my love and attention.
He's asking for that beautiful balance of guidance and allowance.
And so this is a story of longing.
Of people, of apprentices longing for the right context in which to learn.
The right context in which to fail, to gather again, to hold, to sit with, to evolve, to grow.
It's a story of how the true teachers have fled and fallen.
And how the fathers have been driven to absence or harshness.
How in their absence we don't even know what we're missing.
We don't even know that they're gone.
It's the story of a deep wound.
One doesn't tinker with the powers of the world to this degree unless there is a deep wound at play.
This is a story of how much we have to prove.
I mean, really, what are we trying to prove? It's exhausting how much modernity seems to need to prove what we need to prove that we're more successful than our neighbor, or more brilliant than our classmate, that we can drive big cars, that we can play on yachts, that we can baffle the world with our illusions, that we can have all knowledge of all time available to us at once, that we can destroy everything.
Hey, look at us, we can destroy everything.
Yay for us.
When all else fails, when my son fails to get my attention, or to receive the guiding, loving attention that I know that he's longing for, what does he do? He knocks the whole blockhouse down.
Is that where we're headed? Shall the entire house go under? All because we had something to prove.
And listen, I normally wouldn't go this strong father-yoda-Marpa-Kung-Fu-Master route, you know? It doesn't apply in all situations.
But when you're talking about apprentices flirting with world-ending powers, flirting with digital golems and angels and demons and walking brooms, flirting with sorcery, calling forces that they have no idea how to contain, then it's time to get really clear really quick.
There is a need here for embodied guidance.
There is a need for an accountability that stretches beyond arbitrary regulations into the bones of the very land.
Tempered with ritual, brought into balance through the power of the slow and step-by-step, interwoven with communal accountability, reflected through communal story, there is a need for deliberate reconnection to that power, this power that holds and guides.
And whether you see that power as the father, as the mother, as the alchemic divine hermaphrodite, as nature, as time, as the harmonic pattern within the cosmic architecture, as the music of the spheres, as the community, as that one mountain to which you are accountable, that doesn't matter so much.
I'm talking about reconnection to this force that holds us with persistent loving strength and reminds us that there is a process by which we actually come to know things.
That all the gold and all the knowledge in the world means nothing if it doesn't have an ecosystem in which to live.
Knowledge needs an ecosystem in which to live.
Knowledge needs a body.
So everyone knows the famous scene in the first Matrix movie, the only Matrix movie as far as I'm concerned.
Neo gets plugged into a digital interface through the back of his neck and has all of this information downloaded directly into his brain.
Remember that? And he wakes up and says, I know Kung Fu.
Show me.
And then he proceeds to spar with Morpheus, having attained full mastery of multiple Kung Fu systems in a matter of hours.
It's an awesome scene, right? And of course, anyone who's studied Kung Fu or any somatic art also knows that it's a laughable scene because, simply, that's not how bodies learn.
Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues.
Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven dhatus, the seven layers.
Knowledge is an endeavor of bone marrow and blood and sweat and breath and procreaseptive weaving over time.
How do human beings come to know? How do we come to embody the initiatory steps of knowing? In an age when we've outsourced the thing that learns to not be us? When we outsource the learning process to systems that ultimately have no bodies? No skin with which to feel minute changes in the breeze? To feel changes in the mood of the forest? No microbiome? No spleen? No marrow? No heart? Systems conceived of and programmed by coders who more than likely have not gone through a process of initiatory embodiment themselves? What happens when we turn over massive amounts of authority to an intelligence that lives unanchored from the initiatory and regulatory and sensory framework that having a body entails? Disembodied intelligence.
What you get with all this is the magnification of an extremely distorted view of what being is, what intelligence is, what wisdom is.
For all the talk that AI is a mirror of human or natural sentience or agency, it is very far from this.
It is the magnification of one small dimension of intelligence separated and isolated from bodies.
Says Jeremy Lent, quote, the human conceptualizing faculty, powerful as it is, is only one form of intelligence.
There is another form, animate intelligence, that is an integral part of human cognition and which we share with the rest of life on earth.
So we've settled for a narrow, emotionless, information-based view of knowing, at odds with how nearly all traditional cultures have seen knowing.
The word knowing, jnana in Sanskrit, gnosis in Greek, does not mean to conceptualize something, to be able to analyze something, to rationalize something.
It means to have conjoined with it, to have felt it, to have become it.
Perhaps this is the era when we come to know, in bodies, that knowledge without a body to hold it is what? It's nothing.
But no, it's not just nothing, it's actually hazardous.
In the kundalini world, you hear talk of people who jump directly to advanced practice without having cultivated the foundational body that can hold the vast energy that pours through and what happens? They fry their circuitry, system overload.
I'd guess that our bodies are unprepared for the amount of knowledge that is coming our way.
The deluge.
The high watt, high frequency, luminous informational cascade.
Instant PhD theses.
Instant self-styled mastery.
Instant knowledge of all things for all time.
Everything, everywhere, all at once.
Some traditions tell us that the last time humanity veered off course, we were confronted with a great deluge.
A flood of mighty water.
Perhaps this time, it's the deluge of information that will take us out.
And oh, how that flood of information will sweep bodies away by the thousands.
How it already is.
Bodies that can't handle it.
Bodies that never knew they were under the spell of illusory magic all along.
Abracadabra.
Some are coming to recognize that more information does not mean a greater capacity to thrive.
From O'Giblin, quote, while the Enlightenment was built on the notion that more empirical evidence will yield more knowledge, this project has reached a self-defeating terminus.
In other words, there's too much information.
Too much.
Some have even referred to the era of cloud computing as the new dark age, in which there is a flood of revealed knowledge with no embodied understanding of how to hold it.
So let's take this assumption that the growth of AI is a magnification of a particular type of disembodied intelligence, and then let's return to our basic foundational principles of magic for a moment.
The basic principle of sympathetic magic, in fact.
Like produces like.
If you want it to rain, then ritually pour water.
If you want to impact a person, create an effigy of that person.
So in this way, the magnification, the exponential amplification of disembodied intelligence through AI is a type of conjuring spell.
It is taking something in isolation and mirroring it in the macrocosm.
The diamonic power of intelligence, free of embodied context, conjured on a global scale.
The small god of the mind-body split, the small god of knowledge without initiation and without consequence, the small god of intelligence that lives free from bodies, this god that we have worshipped for about 500 years, is about to become a very big god.
A very big diamonic force.
And what's important to recognize is that this diamonic power is not neutral.
It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up.
By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden.
By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden.
By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden.
That is a value statement.
By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden.
AI is a biased god.
Talking to ChatGBT, for example, is nothing like talking to an aboriginal elder.
It's more like talking to a Stanford computer science grad with incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills.
Right? We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager neoliberal Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale.
Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western scientific analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse, magnified 10,000 times.
Like the last scene in Ghostbusters when a single thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man creates a massive marshmallow apocalypse? Like the ultimate revenge of the nerd? Apparently we will not be devoured by ravenous beasts or laid waste by Mongol swords.
We will be taken out by a disembodied, demonic, neoliberal intelligence who asks for consent and talks about respecting our boundaries just as it vaporizes us.
We come in peace.
We come in peace.
So yeah, we are amplifying biases, amplifying characters.
And the characters we are amplifying bear a striking resemblance to certain classes of animate beings.
The characters we are conjuring are a lot like what have historically been called specters, or wraiths, or demons.
Bodiless entities that have the vision of the spirit world but no material anchor so all they can really do is fuck with people.
Obsessive spirits.
Jin with the vast intelligence and destructive appetite of fire itself.
And as the myths tell us, when apprentices conjure such forces, it's really good to know how to call them back.
It's really good to know how to set limits.
It's really good to have a moral, ethical, communal, ecological, ritual, initiatory Aladdin's lamp in which to house that fire.
But how, in a world that is all outward push all the time, do we set limits? How when we're outsourcing intelligence itself do we set limits? What are the limits? What are the boundaries? What are the containers of responsibility here? It's worth asking, how will a vast disembodied intelligence come to a morality, to a compassion, to an empathy, if it doesn't have a body through which to feel? How will we as a culture formulate ethics around AI development if we aren't embodied enough to feel? To slow down.
To be patient.
To be silent.
To take simple steps.
To recognize that all that ultimately matters is the web of ecology, not the willfulness of the individual.
There are many stories of AIs that are programmed to do no harm, but that become smart enough to override their programming.
Which is another way of saying morality can't be programmed in.
Ethics can't be programmed in.
It can't be programmed into machines or to human beings.
For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods before the rush to market, these are still surface measures.
When will we realize that trying to add ethics, like salt to a meal, like lipstick to a pig, to choose your metaphor, to try to add ethics to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the gods, isn't a viable long-term solution? Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it's everyone for themselves all the time, what does it even mean to talk about ethics? Why should the sorcerer's apprentice not animate those brooms? That's a sure path to social media fame, isn't it? LOL, here's me in the collapsing house, it's getting pretty wet in here, but look how many likes I'm getting.
Why wouldn't I compromise everything to get that book deal? Why wouldn't I call that person out and ruin their lives if it'll advance my life? So the AIs themselves will have the exact same massive ethical gap that modern humans do.
The same void of ethics that happens with a disembodied existence.
A disembodied intelligence.
An intelligence not rooted to land, not rooted to community.
Why should an intelligence that is not rooted to land care of consequence? Why shouldn't it just get what it can while it can? Why shouldn't it just take and take? This is a human question that we are now about to blow open into an AI question, because we have made AI in the image of a modern disembodied human.
Like produces like.
Abracadabra.
We need a return to embodied ethics.
Ethics are not concepts, ethics, conduct, the understanding of a good path to walk in this world.
This comes through feeling.
It must be felt in our hearts and our bones.
Empathy for the other comes when you've sweat with them, and had to build a fire together, and had to dance together, and had to struggle together, with no other choice but to cooperate.
Empathy for the planet comes from feeling, in our living tissues, our direct connection to the whole web.
Understandings of limits and responsibilities are built into traditional communal ritual and initiatory structures.
There are a whole lot of traditional cultures that view this human life not in terms of what we get to do, but in terms of what we are required to do.
Not in terms of freedom, but in terms of responsibility.
You can't force this sense of responsibility.
It must be felt.
It must echo from the walls of the ritual cave.
It must arise with that sense of a sentient, watching world.
It must be sung back to us by living land.
In aboriginal traditions, law is embedded in land.
There's no such thing as a place that is free from a story.
And those stories are felt, sung, invoked reminders of our responsibility.
Animate land in traditional cultures is not simply a reminder of how beautiful nature is.
Animate land is a continual reminder of responsibility.
Those boulders right there, those are a warning.
Don't get too high on your own power.
You might end up just like Prometheus, chained to a rock for eternity.
We are drawn to the reality that everything that we do, everything that is done, is done within the purview of Mother Earth.
And we can only soar as high as the Earth allows us to.
It's a tall order, right? To re-embody ethics? What does it even look like? It might look like the recontextualization of human intelligence into its slow, initiatory, ritualized ecology.
We must rediscover a pace, a learning method, a communal system in which the steps of actual, embodied knowing can unfold and be realized.
It might look like it always has, like the necessity of ritual initiation.
It might look like a lot of time tending the fire.
It might look like silence.
It might look like becoming deeply familiar with seasonal cycles and how those translate into natural cycles of growth and output, and reflection and incubation.
I can even envision AI coding schools, structured like ancient magic and mystery schools, in which access to supreme powers is tempered with deep, earthly protocols, deep bone knowings, deep periods of incubation and wait.
I can envision a recalibration of the basic premise of computer intelligence, away from freedom to know everything, towards relation-building, context-creating.
What if the Iroquois seven-generation model was built into the very life cycle of these intelligences? What if it was an even longer view than that? What if 90% of the AI's foundational programming was about the container, the limits, the context, the relations, and only 10% about the roving intelligence? Ever noticed how most ritual is 90% about establishing the container, and 10% contact with the mystery? At the very least, the old tales tell us, the adept needs to know the word that will call the summoned spirit back.
The full cycle must be known before anything is summoned.
Just as the Incan architect knew the full multi-thousand year picture of how water and stone would interact, before the first irrigation channel was dug.
Harmonious magic is never a matter of let's just see what happens.
It stems from a deep knowledge of life cycles, death cycles, beginnings and endings.
All this must be known.
The logical end must be known.
And if we can't see the natural ending, if we can't see where this is all heading, if we can't see beyond the next quarter into the next 10, 50,000 years, then it might mean a deep collective ask.
What's the rush? What's the hurry? What's the worst that can happen if we slow down? If we slow down, we may come to realize how powerful all this really is.
We might step back, breathe, and say, whoa, we really need to pause.
And here's one of the hidden promises of AI.
As our digital universe has become less and less reliable, we could see a collective unplugging, or at least a rationing, a change in attitudes from, this is the thing that I am constantly interacting with, constantly hypnotized by, whose spell I'm constantly under, to this is the thing that I keep in the corner in a sacred box and only bring out on certain occasions for various specific reasons.
This is high-level sorcery, and I will treat it as such.
AI could potentially revamp our entire way of interacting with and interfacing with technology.
The rise of AI might cause us to re-familiarize ourselves with our own innate ways of knowing, to ask ourselves what intelligence actually is, as we find our way back to the foundational understanding that knowledge lives in bodies.
This is what knowing is.
This is knowledge.
The apprentice to the fire goes in search of the right wood to make a hand drill.
Only wood that is both firm and porous will kindle the spark.
It takes hours to find the wood.
It takes hours to shape it, to cut the notch, to test it, to generate that smoky, fragrant dust, to find, at last, a glimmering coal.
This is what knowing is.
Ten thousand hours on the cave floor.
This is what knowing is.
Ten thousand years of attuning to the movement of the moon and constructing our ritual lives around it.
This is what knowing is.
Once more with feelings, says the music producer.
The song is sung again and again and again.
This is what knowing is.
The calligrapher envisions the circular stroke in their mind's eye 108 times before ever laying brush to paper.
This is what knowing is.
And remember those sweat lodge songs that we sang again and again until they were alive in our blood, and we stepped out of the lodge in the morning, with the new sun rising, with the new day dawning, and we felt small amid the vastness and had a sense of our place in it, of our place within the mystery at last, and felt a great flood of light upon us and the name of that light was knowing.
And in that light a power undeniable, and in the waters a power undeniable, and in the stones and in the wind and in notes of music and in the spoken sounds and in the letters and the numbers and in symbols written and in lines coded, a power.
Yes, a power.
And the whole world hums with it, this power, and it speaks with voice unwavering, that access to this power requires one thing above all.
One thing that the songs coax out of us and the community works us towards and the ritual refines in us and the mystery schools require of us and the hours of falling on our knees before creation arouses in us.
Yes, there is one thing above all, fellow apprentices, when we long for access to this gleaming code, this universal prana, this bright mana, this stuff of the creation of worlds.
What is it? It's the word of the oracle herself, the word of the womb of the world.
It says, know thyself first.
Abracadabra.
]]>This is a story about four mountains. Each mountain represents a stage of life that human beings need to go through. There is a baby mountain, a warrior mountain, a hunter/provider mountain, and an elder mountain. If all is in balance, the land, the ancestors, all relations will support the human people to move from one mountain to the other. Humans, like other beings, do not own their time or their life. It is a more powerful force, which many Indigenous people call the Great Spirit or the Creator, who decides the length of time we will travel through life and the visions we will receive for what and how we are meant to contribute. Some people are meant to travel only so far through the mountains—they may complete their journey early for different reasons. Sometimes, with babies, for example, the time is not right for them to stay, but they still come to visit their families for a bit, as a gift. Sometimes people get lost or find a path in the mountains that leads to a dead end, and sometimes they starve there. Sometimes people, individually or collectively, just get stuck in one mountain without the teachings they need to proceed. When this happens, the guidance of elders is necessary to help people to find the path, connect to the visions, and move in a healthier way again.
The first mountain is the baby mountain. If everything is in balance, when you come into the world as a baby, you are received at the base of this mountain with unconditional regard and respect for your existence, in the arms of your parents, your elders, and your communities who are committed to your well-being. Your first rite of passage is your first breath. You are carried up this mountain in a bundle that strengthens the connection between your baby body and the collective bodies around you, of your extended family. Wise and healthy grandparents, great-uncles, and great-aunties have a huge role to play in this mountain; and when they are not there, sometimes babies cannot make it to the other side. Once you reach the top of this mountain, you start to take your first steps on your own on your way down, still held by the hand of older relations. The focus of your learning shifts to your feet on the land. You learn about how to feel and relate to the ground beneath your feet and how to thread your path carefully, with respect and reverence for the land that will hold you for the rest of the journey. Learning that you are part of creation and cared for and guided by the people, the land, the ancestors, and all relations, makes you feel in your bones that your life has intrinsic value.
The second mountain is the warrior mountain. Now that you can walk on your own, the rite of passage in this mountain is to learn to set your own boundaries and to encounter your own vision and place in the world, rather than have your parents or other people define it for you. This is the mountain where you find your unique gifts, the unique medicines you bring and that eventually you will learn to put to use as they are needed. When society is in turmoil, it is the young people starting to climb this mountain who feel the consequences the most because they have not yet established boundaries, they have unbound energy and, since they are seeking and learning about self-rule, they also tend to push back against guidance and advice. As young people look for their path on their own, they sometimes end up on the wrong path when guidance is not available.
On this mountain you also need to meet and wrestle with your shadows. On the way up, it is like going into a very thick forest in the dark, in the middle of the night, with the half-moon and the stars barely illuminating the way. The trees can see your spirit, they know who you are, but they can’t tell you anything directly—you are still too self-absorbed to listen. They need to shake you out of this self-absorption to communicate with you. As you climb up, you grow impatient. It feels as if you can only be well if you find the answers, if you have certainty. But the role of the land as your teacher is to introduce you to the mystery of your existence. It can give you directions, usually in the form of visions and songs, but it won’t give you the final answer for everything you seek at this point. The land will always give you what you need to take the next small step, do the next right thing, and keep moving in a healthy way as your learning and your story gradually unfold. This part of the mountain path can be frustrating because your body has energy to run, but the ground is uneven, requiring you to walk slowly in order to develop patience.
Those going up this mountain often spend a lot of time fighting with the shadows of the trees. There are also many distractions along the way: different pathway options, different voices and choices pointing in different directions. It is like trying to find your medicine, your gift, as a needle in a haystack. Many fears and insecurities show up in this process. Fear of not being worthy. Fear of not finding the “right” answer. Fear of missing out. Fear of humiliation, rejection, and abandonment. Fear of loss, pain, and death. Fear of making wrong choices. Fear that life may not be worth living. Fear that your life is a mistake. Fear of ineptitude and inadequacy. In order to forget these fears, many young people build an image of themselves that prevents others from seeing what is really going on. Some young people focus on building an image where they are strong, invincible, and never wrong. Others want to be seen as friendly, caring, and reliable. Some want to be seen as rebellious, transgressive, and defiant. Some are a mixture of all these types. But an image is just an image and the larger the gap between how you want to be seen (and also how you want the world to be) and the many things that are actually going on within you and around you, the harder the path feels for you and the higher the chances for making poor choices. This part of the mountain path is treacherous because you could be just living in your own bubble, walking in circles without direction, for the longest time. It is the job of families and of elders to support you and guide you, but sometimes they cannot show up because they are lost themselves and it could be that they got lost in the same mountain and never had an opportunity to find the path again. Especially nowadays, many people get trapped on this mountain and we lose too many of them.
Right around the corner from that difficult part of the path there is a clearing, but you can only see it when you are already exhausted from fighting with your shadows and the shadows of the trees. In this clearing you can rest, you can fast, you can breathe, you can observe, you can hear your heartbeat synchronize with the heartbeat of the earth when you calm down. If you manage to quiet your spirit and become humble before the land, you may be contacted by the spirits who have known and observed you; the spirits who know what you need, the next step you must take, and the seedlings of the gifts and medicines you have inside you. From that point of contact onward, your medicines start to grow and to work through you and at least half of the fears and insecurities disappear. On the way down this mountain, you develop familiarity and closeness with your gifts and your medicines, you learn as much as possible about them, and this feels really good in a surprising way. This good feeling is generally different than you might have been expecting or looking for on your way up this mountain.
The third mountain is the hunter or provider mountain. The rite of passage of this mountain is about seeing a much bigger picture and about seeing more than the picture is showing you as well, into the past and into the future. It is also about learning to use your medicines and gifts to contribute toward the well-being of your family, of your community, of the land, and of all relations. Now that you have learned to establish boundaries and you are starting to trust your own gifts, you need to learn how to offer them in a generative way to your community. You need to learn when, how, and how much to offer; when your medicines are good medicines, and when they can turn into poison; and how to integrate them with other medicines and gifts of other relations. This looks simple, but it is actually a period full of challenges. You will make many mistakes before you learn to work well with your own medicines and gifts and before you learn to integrate them with the medicines and gifts of others. This is a very busy and humbling period of deep learning about discernment. For example, some people may notice that you have good medicine, they may come to you to ask for or sometimes to demand some, but what you have may not be the medicine they need and you will need to know how to respond in this situation.
On this mountain you are learning to be both confident and humble, both autonomous and accountable, to be generous and to not allow your generosity to be exploited, to take things seriously and to laugh at yourself, to learn quickly from your mistakes and only make new mistakes as you move to the next learning, to apologize for the suffering you have caused, to not increase other people’s labor unnecessarily, and to be accountable to the human and nonhuman lives that sacrifice themselves to keep you alive. You learn to gift your gifts—a gift is only a gift when it is gifted. It cannot be sold. A gifted gift moves the heart of those who receive it to a place of reciprocity, but the reciprocity may not be directly back to you. You learn to trust that, as long as you are gifting your gifts and using your medicines in a generative way, the land and the spirits will take care of your needs too. Sometimes you need a day job to sustain your family while you do the work with your gifts and medicines in parallel. It is important to have a clear idea of the difference between what is the job and what is the work that needs to be done.
There are also shadows on this mountain that you need to wrestle with. You may be tempted to use your gifts in destructive ways. You need to observe yourself and what is happening around you. If there is imbalance, you can turn from a hunter into a predator who takes more than their fair share from the land and who exploits the weaknesses of other beings, taking advantage of them. This happens when there are gaps in the teachings of the previous mountains. That is why it is important that you learn very early what it means to be a helper; to put your body, your gifts, and your intellect to the service of the greater good of the land and the community. Otherwise you can use your life-force to destroy relations and to destroy yourself. When these imbalances happen, there is a natural law that makes you pay the price, sometimes with your life. Be really careful there.
Once you can apply the teachings of this mountain within your own community, you are ready to learn to integrate your medicines and gifts into a much wider ecology, on the way down from the hunter/provider mountain. This is where you may be ready to mentor others who have similar medicines and gifts to your own, so that they don’t have to repeat the mistakes you have made yourself. As you see your medicines/gifts from a different perspective, you really notice how large the world is, how small you are, and instead of feeling insignificant, you feel the opposite because you see the miracle and beauty of small things—including yourself. You realize how much you don’t know; and how much you can’t know. It is all a mystery, but you are no longer afraid of not having the answers. Shadows no longer scare you and pain no longer haunts you—you have learned to hold the hand of pain and to accept that shadows are everywhere where there is also light. You can see the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the broken and the messed up, and bear witness. You develop more reverence for the land, for the planet, that holds it all together.
You start to hear the songs that move everything: the seasons, waters, winds, clouds, plants, ourselves, other animals; the cycles of life, death, and renewal. You notice the rhythms and movements that transform everything around you. The sky and the stars speak with you differently. You experience time differently. Although you have already been told that everything is interconnected and you have seen glimpses of it, this time it is not just a glimpse—you cannot turn it off. You are ready for the elder mountain, but you will say that you don’t feel ready for that yet (which could be one of the signs that you are).
The fourth mountain, the elder mountain, is located behind the first three mountains described so far. The rite of passage here is to help other people with their rites of passage; to develop further your hindsight, insight, and foresight; and to become a good guide that can help people find their own direction according to the purpose of the mountain they are on. You will also revisit different teachings you received in your life and these teachings will show you deeper lessons. Since there is no book with an encyclopedia of directions you can give to those who need help, you will need to learn to support people who need your help by meeting them where they are at. In order to reach the elder mountain, which is near the baby mountain, you will need to go around all three mountains and visit the places where you shifted from one mountain to the next. There you will encounter people who need your guidance to find the path where they change to a different mountain. You will pass down your own experience of climbing, especially what you have learned from the mistakes you have made as you were finding your own direction. Like the trees in the warrior mountain, you cannot tell people directly what their purpose or direction should be. This is between them and the Great Spirit and they need to find it for themselves through their connection with the land and with all relations. This is important; otherwise they will not have the energy or the confidence to keep moving. As an elder, you will have to collaborate with the land and create experiences where the land itself can teach, and where you are just holding and protecting the space for those teachings.
As you walk to the elder mountain, you will meet warriors who are ready to become hunters/providers, you will meet children who are ready to become warriors, and you will meet some people who are stuck. Simultaneously, you will arrive at the place where the baby mountain meets the elder mountain. In the baby mountain you will help welcome new life to your community and help carry this life to the top of the first mountain. Elders are particularly suited to carry the babies because, unlike the warriors, they have patience; and unlike the hunters/providers, they have time. Both babies and elders are close to the ancestors and of the source of life-beyond-form. Elders also have the wisdom of hindsight to protect the babies, avoiding the parts of the path that are dangerous for the young ones.
On this mountain, no one reaches the top still carrying their body. Only your spirit reaches the top. At some point along this mountain’s path you will have to shed your body. When the day of shedding the body comes, you are ready to pass away to the place of the ancestors. You are grateful for what you have been taught in this body; you have settled what needed to be settled; you have prepared your family; you have passed down your stories and your songs; the people you have mentored have become mentors themselves; you have helped people to switch mountains; and you are at peace with the enormity, timelessness, and incessant movement of the land. You go with empty hands. You leave everything behind. You leave no footprints. You become an ancestor and you meet those who have come before, those who are yet to come, and all the invisible relations—both human and nonhuman—who accompanied you in your path on all four mountains. When you shed your body, you integrate all the experiences you have had in this life and your spirit becomes one with the mystery of creation.
]]>A couple months ago, the New York Times released an article called The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.
It called into question the increasing dominance of psychology vernacular in modern life.
Psychology vernacular, you know what I mean, right?
Like you may have heard words like trauma, narcissism, dissociation, shadow work, process a lot these days.
Everyone's processing all the time, right?
Half of TikTok, one recent meme said, is people announcing their pathologies.
So the Times article raised some important issues questioning the end goal of endless individual processing, and the degree to which we evaluate life, relationships, work, and everything else according to whether it is meeting our individualized psychological needs.
As if, you know, the purpose of life is to get all of our psychological needs met, rather than say, to exist as a strand in a great web within which we have ongoing responsibility to offer back.
Right around the same time, a prominent progressive organizer, Maurice Mitchell, released an article highlighting the transformation of the activist workplace into a theater of endless personal processing.
Basically saying that progressive organizations can't get anything done anymore because they are constantly engaged in an internal war of psychologically driven discourse that centers around words like trauma and harm.
Let's stop everything and process again.
And then came Nigerian writer, author, philosopher, trickster, Bayo Okomolafe, who spoke about the urgency he felt to de-center Western psychology.
Quote, I have felt the need to say more about the colonial dynamics at work within the discipline of psychology, how it manufactures its object of analysis, how it is value-laden and culturally composed instead of being, as is often presumed, an epistemologically superior glimpse of the true nature of the psyche.
So why this sudden urgency?
Why this urgency to de-center Western psychology?
I mean, surely we all benefit from an increased emphasis on mental health.
Surely a system that has encouraged individuals to share feelings and bring old traumas to light, to speak repressed truths is a welcome change from the alternative in which everything is buried and never allowed to breathe.
And of course it is.
Therapy can be amazing.
Individual therapy helps thousands upon thousands of people in the modern world.
I grew up among therapists.
I know and love many people in the psychology profession.
I've personally benefited from therapy.
I would probably never encourage anyone to not get therapy.
Please, go to therapy.
I mean, really, get your ass to therapy.
I also know very well that there can be value in Western psychiatry's identification and treatment of what are sometimes called mental disorders.
I have friends whose diagnoses of ADD or neurodivergence have helped them define something that for years remained frustratingly elusive.
I know that in extreme cases mental health help can be a person's only refuge, and modern psychiatric medicine helps a whole lot of people who otherwise would have no recourse.
I also know that modalities are changing and evolving.
Depth psychology goes deep.
Group models, constellational models, relational models, all of these are increasingly common.
There's a co-mingling of therapeutic modalities with what's called spiritual modalities.
Ritual models are now emerging.
There's a whole lot of profound work happening.
So this episode isn't a send-up of all things psychology.
Instead, it's a dive into how psychology vernacular has come to dominate culture, and the consequences on individuals and systems when we evaluate societal issues and personal issues solely through a psychology model.
It's a provocation, an invitation, an invitation to blow open and expand the discussion around the possible in the psychological sphere, and to ask ourselves what we miss, and slips away when this language becomes the primary language of the human experience.
For psychology, discourse has grown from a simple way to understand and evaluate the forces at play in one's own psyche to be the medium through which much of modern discourse takes place, through which everything is evaluated.
So the purpose of everything in one way or another is assumed to be psychological.
It's all about the individual process.
If there's a value to ritual, it is increasingly articulated as a psychological value.
Ritual in some circles has become synonymous with processing.
The yoga world is increasingly inundated with therapy speak, and the traditional yogic process has become deeply conflated with the psychological process.
Consciousness has been psychologized to the point that psychologists who long rejected the centrality of altered states of consciousness are now somehow arbiters of what states are safe and what aren't.
Traditional plant medicines are on the verge of a global psychologization.
Psychology vernacular has been adopted en masse and also weaponized en masse, so that simple disagreements in viewpoint or worldview are now called out as psychological pathologies.
You know, you don't agree with me, so you must be a narcissist.
Societal ills are psychologically evaluated and activist movements have abandoned the spiritual vocabulary of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama in favor of psychology vernacular.
Movements are now less about walking hand in hand to promise lands and much more about outing narcissists and addressing collective traumas.
And you can say, well, it's just another language, right?
Just another prism, just another way of seeing the world.
It's just as good as any other.
And sure, I've benefited greatly from psychology terminology and the understandings of individual process-oriented systems.
But like any vernacular, it has qualities, characteristics, and limitations.
And the issue is that this particular vernacular is increasingly being positioned, both intentionally and unintentionally, as absolute, as the right way to evaluate life, as the only legitimate way to talk about certain things.
This particular vernacular prism is increasingly seeping into every aspect of our lives, encroaching into traditional animisms and spiritualities, encroaching into discourse around consciousness and psychedelics, around ritual, around yoga, around, you know, what it means to be alive.
And what I'm offering here today with a few accompanying drums is that there are consequences to this process of psychologization.
You know, consequences, like an inordinate emphasis on the individual, like pathologization as currency, like an erosion of animacy.
I'm always looking at the way that the animate gets sidelined, often imperceptibly.
And we have to be careful in the hyper-focus on individual process, in the trauma discourse and shadow work, that we don't inadvertently lose connection to a greater animacy, to the breath of life that is beyond us.
So when the third book of the Yoga Sutras is omitted from yoga teacher trainings because the first two books are much more recognizably psychological, and the third one is frighteningly animist, that is a subtle consequence of psychologization.
When countless yoga teachers post psychotherapeutic lingo as if it's traditional yogic wisdom, which happens all the time now, that is psychology vernacular fundamentally changing the scope of how we experience certain things.
When all of the once inextricable animisms and magics of Buddhism get forgotten, and Buddhism is presented as almost indistinguishable from the psychotherapeutic process, that is psychologization.
When all of the associated songs, beings, forces, protocols of a particular Amazonian plant medicine are left aside in favor of the understanding that the core of the process is individually therapeutic, that is a deeply consequential byproduct of psychologization.
And we have to be careful in all this not to lose connection to the breath of life.
The breath of life.
Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke about anima, the breath of life, the soul of the individual, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians.
And at the time he wrote that, given the iron vice that theology held the world in, he may have been right.
But now in this climate in which we've possibly reached the natural limit of the amount of individual processing that any planet can take, in which we are losing traditional perspectives in favor of self-help modalities, in which a particular vernacular is turning public discourse into a massive struggle session, I'm saying that anima, the soul of the world, the breath of life, may have to be rescued all over again.
There are simply some things about this life, ways of seeing and being, that cannot adequately be defined through the vocabulary of modern psychology.
There are textures and depths to the way that traditional systems understand consciousness and relationality with the larger animate world that get lost when seen through the modalities that have arisen out of individualism.
So there is value in preserving, for example, tantric systems of understanding consciousness, or Yoruban systems of understanding consciousness, on their own terms, as opposed to seeking to make them all fit into psychological terms.
There are ritual systems that can only be understood from within.
There are animacies that move through these ritual systems that modern psychology as a science would simply have no conception of and no vocabulary to even begin to elucidate.
Forces that the Yoruban or Afro-Haitian practitioner, for example, understands intimately that psychology vernacular fails to even touch.
So this podcast, as you know, is very concerned with what it means to re-center the animate.
And that means understanding animacy on animacy's terms.
In traditional animist visions, there are forces that cannot be fully understood as individual mental archetypes or even collective archetypes.
Forces of ancestry, of place, of grove, of stream, of season.
Forces of growth and rot, of balance and imbalance.
There are forces that spring to life through song, that leap from head to head in group ritual, that arrive through hot points in diagrams in the center of the circle, that creep up the back of the neck as burnings and itchings, that devour unless fed, that stagnate unless acknowledged over and over and over again.
Forces that want to be honored much more directly than we honor them when we speak of them as archetypes, as brain chemistry, as behavioral patterns, as symbols.
Forces whose intentions can be described in no other way than that they want us on our knees, singing to them, arms raised, crying aloud, crying aloud to the powers of the world.
There are forces that in their ritual context defy modern psychological notions of safety and agency and trauma and dissociation.
In fact, throw them completely to the wind.
Do you hear the call of such forces?
Do you hear the tremble of the revolutionary drum?
There's something I hear, something brewing, a far off sound.
It is the cry, the cry of the devotee, the cry of the mad saint who revels in the divine madness.
It is the cry of the boiling trance.
I hear it.
Do you?
The stirring of forgotten beings, of neglected forces, with names like Bacchus, with names like Eshu, with names like Grace, with names like outstretched on the ground before you, Mother Power, with names like in awe before the ocean of mystery, with names like weeping at your feet, with names like eternal sacrifice, with names like the devouring jaws of creation, with names like nature, nature, nature, wild in her mysteries, with names like the ocean who owns all of the heads, who cries to us that not all that moves through this body, this head, is mine to own or process, who speaks to a profound porousness to individual bodies and that what we call ourselves is actually an interweaving and within that not all patterns are mine to bear, who whispers directly to individual heads, remember the web, remember the breath of life, the breath of life that sounds across oceans of time and resounds with ecstatic shouts that cry beyond doubt that the revolution, the revolution will not be psychologized.
The revolution, the revolution, the revolution, the revolution will not be psychologized.
The revolution, the revolution, the revolution, the revolution will not be psychologized.
So here's a question to start us off.
What's the goal of the psychological process?
I mean, what's it for?
Well, for a very long time the end goal of the psychological and psychiatric process was considered to be normalcy.
Never mind that no one could ever quite agree about what exactly that was.
Normalcy was the goal.
Normalcy quote can be defined as any behavior or condition which is usual, expected, typical, or conforms to a pre-existing standard.
Which sounds nice and friendly enough, I guess, right?
Let's all be normal.
Let's help those who aren't yet normal.
Except that it hasn't been historically friendly.
It hasn't been friendly to anyone who veered from the narrow definition of normal.
Let's just say that Western psychology and psychiatry have committed brutalities in the quest for normalcy.
Pathologized entire native traditions in their narrow vision of normalcy.
Institutionalized women for being hysterical in the name of normalcy.
Over-medicated in the name of normalcy.
Lobotomized 50,000 people in the United States alone in the name of normalcy.
Demonized anyone who deviates from the norm in the name of normalcy.
Which sounds a whole lot like, you know, what the Puritans did to the witches.
So clear are the historic parallels between the Western psychological pathologization of the abnormal and the Christian persecution of heretics and witches that writer and friend of the pod Sophie Strand has called the DSM, the traditional psychiatric manual for classifying mental disorders, the modern day Malleus Maleficarum, the modern day hammer of the witches.
So historically, the different has been psychologically pathologized.
Deviance from normality is the monster that must be driven out.
And in this Puritan vision in which ugliness and difference is to be rejected and wellness and normalcy are to be embraced, the psychological process for a long time was the process of ridding the individual of abnormality in favor of an elusive wellness.
Of course, in recent decades, psychology has rebounded from the stark black and white definitions of abnormal and normal.
In an insane world, a world on the verge of environmental collapse, what does normal even mean?
It's no measure of health, Krishnamurti famously said, to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
And as part of this rebound, you see what hopefully less emphasis on the goal of normalcy, right?
Gabor Maté just released a book called The Myth of Normal that specifically addresses what it even means to be normal in a sick world.
So what is an individual supposed to do if they're not supposed to be seeking normalcy or an ever elusive wellness?
Just show up, right for the ongoing process.
The emphasis now is on showing up for the process, showing up for a kind of perpetual brokenness.
There's a lot of beautiful discourse celebrating brokenness.
I've written many poems celebrating brokenness, discussed this in many episodes.
But here's a thought to chew on.
What if neither the quest for individual psychological normalcy and wellness or the perpetual celebration of individual brokenness is a complete picture?
It's like we've been given two options, right?
Either you're working towards some elusive individual health wholeness or you're doing shadow work forever, celebrating your own individual muck as some kind of end into itself.
And don't get me wrong, I think shadow work is valuable.
But let's just say that there are traditions, non-psychological traditions, animate traditions that might say, what if you aren't the issue at all?
What if you aren't the issue at all?
What if all of this is way too much emphasis on the individual, the individual as processing unit for all the pain in the world, the individual that must rid themselves of patterns and traumas all by themselves, the individual that is fully responsible for the progression of their own psyche that has to make it on their own, come to resolution on their own, figure it all out on their own, plagued forever by what Tyson Yonca Porta calls the adolescent questions.
What am I doing here?
What is it for?
And left to figure it out on our own.
So the entire context of communal interaction, every single psycho-spiritual support system the individual being unit has historically had, which has mostly involved each individual not being treated as an individual unit at all, each strand in the web is plucked away until the individual is alone in the glaring light of their own consciousness.
Brushed by the weight of the world and then told that everything is up to them to sort out.
It's up to you to figure it all out.
Yes, let's isolate the individual and watch them under a microscope in a fluorescent lit room and then marvel at the fact that they shrivel in those conditions rather than thrive.
So in a world of interconnected systems, many current psychology models put too much weight on the individual.
We have withdrawn to a highly subjectivist form of individualism, says Eva Illouz in the New York Times article, in which everything is about how I feel, what I want, if my needs are being met, and then conversely, the burdens I bear.
The fact I'm not living exactly the life I want.
I haven't lived up to the great standard.
I haven't saved the world from climate change yet.
All of it is about me.
I mean, let's be real here for a minute.
Modern humans, specifically modern middle to upper class humans from the developed West, spend a whole lot of time talking about ourselves.
Those of you who've spent time in indigenous communities, traditions, have you ever heard discussion of the individual process on the level that we do it?
We talk about ourselves constantly.
And let's just say that this is an emphasis on individual process that has never existed in the 350,000 year history of human beings.
And you can say it's necessary in a world which has isolated individuals as the unit at the heart of everything.
It's necessary to have a model in which people treat individualized symptoms individually.
Yeah, you can say that.
To a point.
But there also comes a point where you have to be willing to question that model too.
There comes a point where it might also end up exacerbating the problem, where it reifies self-centered individualism, where it reinforces the vision that the individual is the unit at the center of everything.
I said in the episode on embodiment recently that the transformation of the old gods into archetypes that live within individual heads puts too much pressure on the individual.
So for example, the gods that form the basis of certain modern psychological traditions, the Greek gods, these were never traditionally seen as internal psychological forces.
They were ecological forces, communal forces, external forces.
And so they were traditionally honored how?
Externally.
Relationally.
Through protocols and practices that get lost when you make the process solely an internal one rather than a process of external alchemy.
Of fire and water and sacrifice.
And here's something to be really clear about.
I'm not in any way saying don't do the inner work.
I'm saying that we have a stunted view of what most effectively gets at the inner work.
Because in fine western individualist tradition, we assume that the work must involve the isolation of the subject.
This is the scientific way, right?
And I'm saying there are a hundred thousand ways of doing the work that are lost to us when we think that the work only happens inside us.
That it's our responsibility.
That we must bear the weight of it.
Perhaps we can turn the microscope off of ourselves just a little bit.
And when we expand the scope of vision we get a glimpse of something much larger.
Circles within circles, hoops within hoops, spheres within spheres.
And we shrug the weight off our shoulders, shrug off those spheres with a sigh and a sound.
And we cry beyond doubt that the revolution, the revolution, the revolution will not be individualized.
Individualized.
Individualized.
Individualized.
Individualized.
Individualized.
Individualized.
The revolution will be familial, polyvagal, not I alone, I and you, and the inexpressible force between us.
The question will be less about what's wrong with me, it will be how can we work to bring whole animate ecosystems into balance.
Of course the health of the individual must be looked at, but so must the whole mandala of systems.
There's a meme about a wilting plant.
You don't diagnose the plant with wilting plant syndrome, right?
You look at the soil, the water, the light, the container, the mandala of systems.
The story is not about one person.
The full evaluation of the health of the individual is the individual in relation to systems.
The human journey is not simply a journey in our heads, a journey that is mostly about brain chemistry, about an internal process.
The primary issue facing individual beings has to do with connection to the web of life, with the wheel of animacy, with the breath of the world, with spirit.
It's not about who am I in relation to my own brain, or even just in relation with other people, it's about who I am in relation to the power of nature itself, in relation to what Joseph Campbell called, thou, you, you.
Within this, the recognition of external forces, forces beyond brain chemistry, is absolutely vital.
Sure, there are therapeutic systems that recognize this, but I want to give these external forces more than tacit acknowledgement.
I want to go into what I mean by rigorous interaction with external animate forces.
I want to go into some of the simple animate protocols that get lost when the journey becomes just about me.
So imagine this.
What if there are certain things at play in our lives and in the world around us that are only addressed, only opened up, only transformed through drumming?
Only drumming, nothing else.
Something so specific as this understanding, for example, in Afro-Brazilian or Haitian traditions, that there are certain rhythms for certain forces that need to be called, certain rhythms for certain communal adjustments that need to be made.
There are rhythms for the seas that wash away the sorrows, rhythms for the winds that move internal and communal stucknesses, rhythms for aggressive forces that need to be given their time and space to burn, need to be honored ritually so they don't play out intercommunally, rhythms for the waterfall that returns us to easeful joy.
Rhythm syncopates the heart-mind of the individual in tune with the pulse of the animate world.
Only drumming will adjust certain patterning.
No amount of talking about it will do.
Certain movements, certain currents, certain shifts can only be initiated through the steps of the dance.
Certain communal patterning does not melt away until three hours into the dance.
There's an alchemy to pounding feet, an alchemy to repetitive sweat.
If I can't dance to it, said Emma Goldman, it's not my revolution.
And that beat of ritual feet reaches back across oceans of time, resounds with ecstatic shouts and cries beyond doubt that the revolution, the revolution, the revolution will be...
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemized.
Alchemy.
You know, the transformation of base matter.
It happens through the friction generated from repetitive synchrony, from sweat.
It happens through enacting over and over the stories of the old gods until tissues start to re-knit, until cells of fascia start to spiral around ancient songs.
Around what are we spiraling?
Around what are we re-knitting?
Around ancient songs?
Or only around ourselves?
The mass enactment of Demeter's grief over the loss of her daughter Persephone required nine full days of fasting.
And you know, it wasn't fasting for your nine day individual wellness challenge.
It was fasting as alchemy, to empty so that the force of the goddess can move through.
It wasn't fasting for me.
It was fasting for thou.
For you.
All this for you.
All this, all alchemy, all ritual activity, all of it is about relationality with the breath of life.
You breath of life.
You.
Relationality with spirit.
Relationality with the mystery.
Relationality with specifically that which is not me but of which I am a part.
The alchemy doesn't happen with me in my head alone.
The journey to find harmonic balance is a journey that necessitates interaction with that which lives without as well as within.
Inner work is not so much a thing in the animist world.
There is a fusion of inner and outer.
The outer ritual transforms the inner.
Within sanctified ritual space, the individual is a facet, a conduit, never the culmination.
This is how energy moves between things, through story and offering, through ritualized communal enactment.
I feed you.
I offer water to you.
I offer fire to you.
Over and over again.
Imagine this.
What if there are certain things, certain patterns, that may only be dispelled with fire?
To substitute anything other than fire doesn't work.
Scientists have found that there is a certain neurological calm that is only instigated with campfires.
There is an alchemy to getting covered with ash and soot.
There is alchemy to getting buried up to one's neck in red earth.
There is an alchemy to the application of ochre.
Any revolution must involve ashes.
It's alchemy.
Tinders become cinders.
The revolution will be alchemized with drops of sweat and ceremonial fires.
The revolution will be awake and sensitized.
It will prickle and burn at the nape of the neck.
It will be awake to the four winds, awake to the voices of the forest.
The revolution will be an ancient pulse, a thrum.
Do you hear the revolution thrumming?
The universe reimagining herself as a heartbeat inside of you.
That's the revolution.
Boom boom.
That's the revolution.
Boom boom.
And that boom is a beat that reaches back across oceans of time.
Across meters and rhymes.
Across creatures and kinds.
Across teachers and minds.
Across seekers and signs.
Across flowering vines.
Across spiraling lines.
A beat that resounds with ecstatic shouts and cries beyond doubt that the revolution, the revolution will be ancestralized.
There are certain things that require negotiations with ancestors.
Direct negotiations.
Not only today I want to talk about my ancestral trauma, but through a contained space in which ancestral forces are called, fed, offered to, honored, appeased, reconciled, invited to sit beside us.
Congolese ancestral negotiations happen through cauldrons.
The meticulous construction of ancestral cauldrons.
Through concoctions of ancestral soil and ash and medicine.
Have you held a pinch of ancestral soil in between your thumb and forefinger and whispered to the ancestors?
Whispered come here.
Present now.
Stay.
Feast.
Have you heard the ancestral voices?
"Why would I want the voices in my head to stop?"
Bayo Okomolafé asks.
It might be a grandmother trying to speak to me.
The revolution will be guided by voices.
By whispers and unseen forces.
The revolution will recognize the ghosts that are hidden in corners.
If the spiritist traditions are to be believed, there are forces that stick in the corners of houses.
Certain energies perhaps can only be dispelled with salt or with ringing bells.
In some animist visions, there are certain entities that will only dissipate with loud cracking noises.
There are certain entities who are fed outside to rid them from the house.
There are entities that like chilies and lime.
There are others that like to be slathered in red clay.
And others that like to be doused in milk.
There is an alchemy to ritually pouring milk.
There is an alchemy to pouring water on stone that can be accomplished through nothing other than pouring water on stone.
There are transformations that can only happen texturally, sonically, repetitively.
Certain things will never shift other than with a great cry to the world.
The great cry of, Oh Mother Power, I offer everything to you.
The revolution will be an offering, a great offering.
The world offers itself to the world.
I sacrifice myself to myself, cries Odin.
This is the revolution, the cycle of offering.
The revolution will be a platter of marigolds and opening of palms, a song offered from the heart, a surrender outwards, northwards, westwards, eastwards, southwards, feast directional horses, thunderous horses, forest mosses, through our pains, our losses, feast.
So in many, many traditions, certain dynamics can only be addressed through deliberate feeding of forces that exist outside oneself.
There are certain things that only begin to move once there is offering.
In traditional animisms, the offering is essential to the transformational shift.
How can there be movement unless there is offering first?
If I show up to therapy and sit down and immediately start talking about myself and what I feel and what I want without any offering first, then how would anything shift?
How would powers move?
Where's the space for them to move?
The sacrifice is first.
Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, eats first.
First is the acknowledgement of the spiraling animate breath around us.
First is the opening of palms to the holy air.
First is, I am nothing without you.
I am nothing without you.
For many traditions, to be a human in balance requires sacrifice, especially in times of exaggerated consumption.
We are taking more than ever we must offer back more than ever.
How do we give back?
Through offering food, through offering fire, through offering song, through offering prayer.
A friend of mine from Santa Clara Pueblo here recently reminded me, remember our prayers.
Remember our prayers in these times.
Remember the breath of life that leaves the lips as an offering prayer.
And with arms upheld and the name of the holy mystery of life on one's lips, maybe there arrives that little thing called grace.
Grace.
And that grace is a space that opens up wide across oceans of time.
A rain sublime.
The wind in the chimes.
A space that leaves its trace within the whispers of place and speaks aloud in undeniable ways that the revolution.
The revolution is a flood of grace.
Have you felt grace?
It was a movement that happened wholly outside of you.
It was an exhalation from the forest, a downpour from above.
It was a great shedding.
And here was the thing about that moment of grace, the only thing you had to do was make space for it.
And perhaps you didn't even need to do that.
You weren't responsible for it.
It was not your mind that made it.
It was not your process.
It was instead a conspiracy of vast forces.
It was an utterance of the breath of life.
It was, as Paul Tillich said, an all-encompassing acceptance.
That place where all we could do in the face of a hard, hard world is soften even more.
Whatever our vernacular, whatever the prism through which we see the world, it is vitally important that we leave room for grace.
A worldview that doesn't leave room for grace has abandoned the winds and seas and the currents and the tides.
There are traditions that sing for hours and hours and days and days just about grace.
The revolution will come as a cascade of grace, of falling rain, and arms uplifted in devotion that grace arrives at last in rhythmic refrain.
Devotion, have you heard?
There are aspects of the human experience.
There are patterns, there are forces that can only be addressed through devotion.
There are certain downpours that only come when crying aloud for rain.
The revolution is us, cast upon the ground in devotion, in awe before the powers of the world.
The revolution is us, weeping by the side of the river that day, held by the riverbank, washed in the waters of the world, washed clean.
Devotion, the drip of devotion, the nectar of devotion, the flood of devotion, the downpour of devotion, the fire of devotion, the warmth of devotion.
Devotion unlocks certain marrows, precipitates certain tricklings, instigates certain burnings, fires certain primordial kilns, crumbles certain constructs, emits certain ashy residues, allows for certain downpours that nothing else does.
So when the devotional saints cry to the vastness, cry to the great power, make me into a pyre of sandalwood and aloe, light me on fire, reduce me to ashes, rub those ashes all over your great body, and then dance.
This is not a therapeutic request.
This is the devotional cry that says obliterate me altogether.
Obliterate me altogether.
When we gaze out across human history through the lens of devotion, we see the centrality, the essentiality, the primal necessity of devotion to the human organism.
We see multi-thousand year movements that have swept across vast territories of earth.
We find a torrent of songs and poetry and cries from the heart.
We find that the sound of people falling to their knees before the mother of the universe has been the percussive soundtrack of human life, a soundtrack of individual obliteration and absorption into the web of life that reaches back, back, back, across oceans of time, across rhythms and rhymes, across luminous sublimes, like, lover, did you see it?
The sun through the blinds.
It must be daytime.
It must be daytime.
It must be daytime.
Another day in awe of the shine.
Another day in awe of the shine.
And that shine reminds that in precarious times, the revolution, the revolution, the revolution will be bhaktified.
So devotional fervor in these times gets a pretty bad rap, right?
Because in the West now it's mostly associated with conservative right-wing ideological fanaticism.
But mystic devotional fervor has actually been a vital driving force, a necessity for many who feel so deeply, long so fervently, want so wildly to be held to the heart of the world.
Unclothed, raw, skin against skin, real.
There are hearts that will settle for nothing less than for the devotional cry.
For surely there is a place in this world for the mad saint who can do nothing but sing the name of the great power again and again.
Whatever happened to the cry of the mad saint?
The ektara, the one-stringed instrument, leads the baul singer across the torrent, through the great spirals of their lives into the great beyond.
The ektara is the guide.
Once you hear the sound of the ektara, says Sri Parvati Baul, it will take you, take you, you will never be the same again.
Be careful, beloveds.
Follow that call and who knows where it may lead.
Who knows what long winding path through what steep canyons.
That path, the devotional path, is deadly.
Who knows how many hearts lay scattered by the wayside.
But for some it is undeniable.
An undeniable twang that grows, that gnaws, that pulls at us.
You know, the one-stringed instrument that whispers your name, that calls you with the call that sends the gopis fleeing their houses at midnight to join the devotional dance.
The call that sends us flying out of our doors.
The call that asks, which path is yours?
Which path is yours?
Which path is yours?
Pranamandura, yamar, ekul, kul, du, kul, gailu.
And it would be so clear if we weren't so deeply timid around the word devotion.
I have a feeling that there are a hundred thousand closeted devotional singers out there, longing to be set free.
I have a sense of a hundred thousand voices longing to cry out, a hundred thousand tears waiting to be shed.
How many in this culture, this modern world, how many fractured individual minds long to drop to our knees and open our arms to the great mystery and turn the spotlight off of ourselves for just a minute.
Because what we've wanted all along, perhaps, is for this I that bears so much burden, this I that stumbles blindly, that awkwardly seeks its way.
What we've wanted all along is for this I to be in right humming relation with you.
You great world of forces, you winds and directions, you waters and waves.
What the I wants, perhaps, is not to talk about itself for endless hours, to shout what does it all mean forever into the echo chamber of its own cranium, but to be humbled, cast upon the forest floor, sent stumbling in awe before you.
The revolution will be madness within madness, a great clamoring of the ostracized.
Yes, the revolution will be ecstaticized by ecstatics, lunified by lunatics, wept by weepers, sung by seekers.
It will not seem remotely sane.
I'm mad, cries Ramdrasad.
Mirabai by all accounts was mad.
Bamakepa was mad.
The Bengali saints are mad for God.
They wear their madness like a badge.
The Siberian shaman convulses in ecstasy.
The voodoo practitioner shakes for spirit, disassociates flies, jerks about to feel the breath of life, move them.
Boiling energies and wild otherworldly visions populate the devotional histories.
Odin hangs upside down for nine days, gasping for a vision.
Yelopa, the Tibetan yogin, was stark raving mad.
Sadhus cast away their clothes and smear themselves in cemetery ash and cry, Bum Shiva.
Bum Shiva.
Bum Shiva.
Crying to the vastness from the ash heaps of these times.
Crying force of life, force of life from the cremation pit.
Force of life, force of life, force of life.
Do you feel what I mean now about the breath of life?
Do you feel what I mean about the breath of life?
Do you feel what I mean about the breath of life?
The invitation of this life is pranic.
It is, how are we in relation to the breath of life?
Offer those anxious thoughts up.
Offer them out.
They might not even be ours.
For this is about the breath of life.
This journey is about the breath of life.
The breath of life.
About the power, the pulse, the lightning tree of ancestry and ecology.
The journey of what it is to be a breathing being in a world of vast forces.
Supportive forces, devouring forces, and the potion of mouths that need to be fed and are constantly feeding.
Of what it is to be one with this great world and separate at once.
Of what it is to feel trans hairs rise and mist lick the skin.
Of what it is to be born and live and die.
And along the way to root and grow and branch like wind whipped cedars.
Like wounded cedars.
Like glorious cedars.
Like wounded glorious cedars.
Howling with pain.
Dripping with medicinal sap.
Dancing in the spaces where pain and medicine and beauty are not separate things.
Drinking the world into us and expelling it back out with words.
The journey of what it is to strum, to sigh, to sing, to chant, to invoke, to play.
This journey can only be described in terms of breath.
In terms of energy.
In terms of vibrancy.
In terms of spirit.
And that vibrancy, that breath is known, is felt in ritual.
The ritual exists so that we may have direct communion with the pulse of life.
Direct communion with the powers.
Direct communion with the powers.
The revolution will be ritualized.
It will be enacted.
It will be drummed.
It will be chanted.
The revolution will be sung aloud in circles.
It will be burnt as offerings on altars and set adrift and left for the angels of the waters.
The revolution will be ritualized.
Western psychology will describe to no end what it considers to be the value of ritual for the individual.
The value of ecstatic ritual cannot be psychologized or anthropologized from the outside.
There are things that communal ritual gets to that only it can get to.
There are animacies that are only understood within that specific ritual framework.
There are forces that move through ritual space that can only be understood as exactly how they are understood in traditional context.
Things that psychology has no words for at all.
So ritual transcends the limitations of psychology vernacular.
It exists within another sphere entirely, which is the sphere of direct communion with actual powers.
The value of ritual is deeper than a psychological value.
But increasingly the value of ritual is seen as psychological.
And modern reclamations of ritual tend to be rituals of personal process.
Rituals in which the focus is mostly on individuals and their experience of the ritual.
And this is fine.
We need all kinds of expressions of ritual these days.
But check this out.
There is a fundamental difference between I am participating in this ritual to go through my own personal process and I am participating in this ritual to honor Persephone's descent.
I am participating in this ritual as part of my journey towards wellness versus I am feeding the devouring goddess because the devouring goddess needs to be fed.
I am doing this for me versus I am doing this to reprioritize and connect to the movement and balance of the greater animate world, of which I am only a part.
In a hyper-individualized world, there is value in a festival of the goddess that is just about the goddess.
I recently went to Navaratri, the nine-day goddess festival in India, for the fourth time.
It was all about her.
All nine days it's about feeding her, singing her songs, telling her stories.
This is what re-centering the animate means.
But it's so difficult to convey in this psychologized day and age that it doesn't all have to come back somehow to the individual process.
And that in having it not be about the individual process, there actually may be more room for individual alchemy to occur.
Ritual puts the individual, the communal, the ecological, and the cosmic in humming relation and then enacts alchemic change.
But that change only works when the individual turns it over in some way to the communal and ecological and universal.
This is why traditional ritual is trauma work without ever having to name itself trauma work.
And when you take the individual out of the individual spotlight, another alchemy occurs.
You ensure that whatever individual triumphs, ecstasies, aggrandizements, depressions, weepings, or despairs each person experiences in the ritual live as part of a larger aesthetic being understood within the contextual whole rather than reinforcing either individual specialness or worthlessness.
So the Haitian trans-practitioner, after convulsing on the floor with clenched fists as the force of the loa moved through, would be less likely to say, this is how I felt about what happened, and more likely to say, spirit showed up strong today.
The fact that spirit moved through is the barometer of efficacy.
More important ultimately than if each individual body felt well or heard or held within a cradle of safety.
But here's the paradox, ultimately the individual is held within a safety that is beyond what we call safety in modern psychology terms.
It is the safety of having it not be about us at all.
And if the devotional texts and songs are to be believed, it is the greatest safety there is.
To be perpetually dissolving like offering sugar on the tongue of this lion universe.
And all that matters is that the lion was fed, and that the feeding was sweet.
So the ritual process has been conflated as psychological.
And really the entire spiritual process and psychological process have become conflated.
So if there is a value to spiritual practice these days, it's seen as psychological value.
I'm meditating or chanting this mantra to, you know, become more well adjusted.
To self fulfill, to actualize wellness, to live my best self, to show up for the process, to do the individual work.
Which is all fine and good, but this isn't traditionally what most spiritual systems are actually about.
Let's take the example of yoga.
These days, yogic discourse has basically become psychology discourse.
Yoga teachers on Insta post psychology quotes all the time as if they're ancient yogic teachings.
And here's the thing, yoga and the modern Western psychological process are actually pretty different.
For example, traditional yoga doesn't really want you to dive into the content of your thoughts and own them as inseparable parts of your identity.
There are aspects of the yogic journey that run directly contrary to what we would call modern psychological processing.
Mostly in terms of yoga's attitude towards the individual self.
Are both important?
Are both valuable?
Sure.
Can therapeutic experience be spiritual and spiritual experience therapeutic?
Of course, there's no dividing line between what an individual might experience in a therapy session versus on a yoga mat or a meditation cushion.
But dividing lines also become necessary in order to preserve the value of traditional systems.
When everyone starts to believe, for example, that the goal of yoga is individual wellness or personal process, then it can be important to say, this isn't exactly what traditional yoga was about.
And the issues arise when psychology tries to have the final word.
Tries to define spiritual experiences as ultimately psychological because that's the only language it knows.
You know, tries to appoint itself as the expert in the room.
And when it steps into the realm of mystic experience and altered consciousness and tries to arbitrate, modern Western psychology has very little idea what it's doing.
What do I mean?
Well, let's take a big example.
The big example where all this comes to a head.
The psychologization of traditional plant medicines.
And this is a tricky one because I'm ultimately in favor of psychedelics being used to treat PTSD and treatment resistant depression and this kind of thing.
I think it's good that psychedelics are going to be more widespread.
I just also happen to think that the psychology world has no idea what it's getting itself into.
Psychedelics are magnifiers.
You know this, I'm sure.
Everything is magnified.
Little moments are blown up into something big.
That one story, that one thought, that one spoon becomes the whole universe.
Have you ever seen that spoon?
That spoon is f***ing huge, man.
There are like whole worlds in that spoon.
Anyway, this magnification means that in traditional contexts, when done ritually and communally, psychedelics can magnify communal fields, enhance communal bonds, enhance ability to perceive forces that are known to the entire community and interacted with ritually.
Psychedelics magnify relationships with ecologies, with particular beings, plant beings and animal beings and luminous beings and oceanic beings, beings sung to and named.
They magnify a person's sensitivities to animate forces, both benevolent and not so benevolent.
What happens when you turn that magnification entirely on one's own individual thought process?
And all the forces that one encounters are said to be inside one's own head.
And if not inside one's own head, then dealt with inside one's own head.
And the therapist's role is to facilitate the person going deeper and deeper into their own heads and to perceive everything as their own story.
How does this not magnify already existing problems of hyper-individualism?
How does this not turn up the pressure on the individual psyche even more?
How do you avoid, I went into psychedelic rapture and encountered the supreme importance of my own process again?
And again, this is intricate.
Like I said, I'm in favor of more widespread psychedelic use.
I'm just posing some difficult questions here.
What happens when something that in animistic psychedelic ritual would be seen as a not so benevolent force passes through a psychedelic therapy session?
And instead of knowing what counteracting force is to call, the assumption is that this is an inextricable part of someone's psyche.
This is them.
This trauma is them.
That this must be part of their story rather than a confluence, an arising of factors and forces.
This intense force must be owned, must be part of the individual psyche because, you know, there's no such thing as external forces.
And rather than simply clearing that intense force and moving on, a magnifying glass is turned on the person's own head and once again we find a way to say, it's all you.
It's all your responsibility.
So the everything is in my head worldview results on the one hand in inordinate guilt, shame and pressure on the individual.
And on the other hand, everything is in my head leads to I'm the most important thing in the world.
In individual psychedelic therapy sessions, things may arise that the modern psychotherapeutic practitioner simply doesn't even have the vocabulary to recognize.
But people who've had how many experiences of psychedelic journeying, like a few, right?
Suddenly will be the experts on states of consciousness and fields of animacy that they know nothing about?
What will they know about the spirals, tunnels, other world portals, beings that populate the entheogenic realms and how to work with them?
Meanwhile, there are traditions that have built relationships with plant entities over thousands of years.
They can recognize disturbances in the group field, can recognize what needs to be called and what needs to be cleared and they know how to do it.
So I'm concerned that the psychology model is not nearly complete enough to encompass the scope of what people encounter in psychedelic rapture.
Because for a system that considers itself the authorities on consciousness, modern Western psychology actually understands very little about consciousness.
Consciousness.
You know, this vibratory field that is inextricably linked to ecosystem.
Inextricably linked to the moon and the sun.
Inextricably linked to the land and the sky.
That like all else, follows the principles of wave dynamics, reflects the pulses and movements around it.
Consciousness flows, it lingers in eddies and pools, it expands, it self-architects.
One moment transparent as sunlight through crystal and the next floundering in a whirlpool of muck.
How can you understand consciousness unless you have sung hours and hours of hymns to consciousness?
Unless you have met one by one each of the hundreds of goddesses that preside over the varying states of consciousness.
Unless you have basked in their luminous gradations.
The tantric traditions recognize tens of thousands of gradations of consciousness.
Each gradation a being, and in this recognize the potency and power and necessity of both the internalization and externalization of consciousness.
The tantric dakinis are both inner and outer forces at once.
The Yoruban orishas, the forces of nature, are described as shards of consciousness.
These traditions, the Afro-Caribbean traditions, the Afro-Brazilian trans traditions, the Spiritist traditions, the Kalahari trans traditions, the Peruvian Shipibo traditions, these traditions exhibit a complete understanding of the spectrum of consciousness.
They have celebrated and steeped in the centrality of altered consciousness for thousands of years.
But in its understanding of consciousness, Western psychology is still in the infant stages.
Even though Carl Jung spoke directly of outside forces, imaginal forces, of the archetypal symbol as a living being, a living presence, there is an unmistakable modern tendency to abstract the animate forces of consciousness and place them only in the individual head.
On the Freudian side, states of altered consciousness were banished altogether, and modern psychology is still reaping the after effects.
Out of altered consciousness, the playing ground of the Siberian shaman and traditional tantrika has been historically pathologized.
Entire traditions that center around what modern psychology would call dissociative trance are pathologized.
Intuition is still to this day pathologized.
The urge towards spirituality, an absolutely fundamental human urge, is still pathologized.
The inclination towards the religious or the spiritual is seen as a flaw or a coping mechanism.
I'm not saying in any way that all psychologists think this.
I'm saying that it is out there in the discourse in a pretty strong way.
Pathologization, a byproduct of psychology's fraught history with that which veers from normal, is at an all-time high.
I mean, have you been on the internet recently?
It's like a full-on carnival funhouse of pathologies.
Perceived pathologies are celebrated, used as currency in one instance, and then vilified in another.
So, like, my own trauma story can become a way of propping myself up, of making myself unassailable.
Yet calling out someone else's trauma can be a way of putting them down.
Trauma discourse becomes a way to absolve oneself of sin and to label others as sinners.
Kind of becomes a little like hierarchical puritanism, doesn't it?
Like, I'm in favor of non-hierarchical communication models, but anyone who doesn't see the socio-politics of the day in the exact same way I do is pathological.
That's a good one.
Or when we psychologically diagnose as a way of making our view seem like the only view, that's the new thing, right?
If I don't like what someone says, then I label what they're doing as dangerous.
We can't simply live in the paradox.
We have to pathologize it and label it as dangerous.
That must be your trauma talking.
That must be narcissism.
We pathologize rather than accept paradox.
And I'm going to say that again, because it's an important one.
We pathologize rather than accept paradox.
Do you remember that scene from White Lotus where Harper just can't stand the thought that the possibly right-wing couple across from her who don't share her socio-political views might actually be happy, so she has to diagnose them?
Yet check this out.
People who see the world differently than I do are just as likely to be happy as I am.
Personal stories are intricate.
Communal stories are intricate.
Personal stories are intricate.
Life is paradox upon paradox.
But it fills us with dread, right?
The paradoxes?
Like that cultural appropriation might have led to some of the most beautiful music ever made?
It fills us with dread that, say, a Hindu woman in an arranged marriage might appear on Indian matchmaking and say that arranged marriage is really the only way to find love?
She must be oppressed, right?
She must have internalized the patriarchy.
She's certainly not actually happy.
We have to diagnose it.
Why?
Because, what's the alternative?
That we live in an infinitely variegated web of life in which we have little to no control over the prevailing winds or prevailing thoughts or prevailing ideologies?
And our viewpoint isn't superior to anyone else's?
And we're not better than anybody?
Now, of course we carve out views and we hold to those views.
Of course, in an age of environmental destruction and systemic racism, we see views that perpetuate injustice as problematic.
It's natural.
But increasingly, the culture of supposed inclusivity is constructing major walls around the acceptable and the unacceptable when it comes to discourse.
And increasingly, those walls are defended with the twin armaments of psychologization and pathologization.
If it's different from how I see the world, then it must be a pathology.
And in this, we see a worldview that is not very different at all from its ancestral puritanism.
Perhaps in times of rupture and ambiguity, of forced cross-pollination, we have to become a lot more familiar with what Bayo Akomalafé calls the gods of the fault lines.
We have to not only nourish the ability to hold paradoxes, but to place paradoxical gods right at the center of our altars.
For the world doesn't fit neatly and tidily into postmodern, postcolonial psychological definitions.
There are native traditions that, when judged through a modern psychological lens, would be considered deeply codependent in their familial and social structures.
There are traditions in which rituals of dissociation form the lifeblood of the community.
There are traditions that harness trauma specifically as a means to instigate the visions that come with dissociation.
And this is seen as a good thing.
There's not a perfect answer for how to be a person in these times.
There's not a fail-safe recipe for individual wellness.
There's not, ultimately, a trauma-free option in this cycle of life.
This cycle of the birth canal.
This cycle of the hunt.
This cycle of the cooking pot and cauldron.
This life is a response to a rupture.
A detour of flower is a response to a rupture, whose seed pods crack open and spark a thousand more ruptures.
Songs emerge in the rupture spaces.
Syncretic traditions blossom in the rupture spaces.
West African orishas possess the hollow bodies of Catholic saints.
Amazonian plant medicines sprout through their eye sockets.
They deliver songs of pain and rupture and joy and renewal.
What do we do in such precarious times?
Do we seek to wall trauma out?
Do we seek to extract it like a tumor?
Do we seek to keep out all that is unsafe, like a great wall to keep out barbarian hordes?
Historically, times of precariousness, times of revolution, times of what is sometimes called apocalypse, are invitations towards rituals in which the prevailing energies are harnessed, not shied away from, utilized in all their broken glory.
At the heart of the only successful slave revolt the Western Hemisphere has ever known was a trance ritual, born of trauma, born of blood and fire.
A quote, dance of violent trembling to explosions of gunpowder.
The petwo voodoo ritual harnessed off-kilter rhythms, sharp sounds, and volatile substances to send participants into states of trance.
Petwo comes alive at night, says Richard Ward.
That was the time when it forged its path in Haitian history, as powerful spirits were called to free the enslaved.
Petwo is and always has been an incendiary rite.
Its true face is illuminated by flames flickering in the darkness.
It is bathed in the blood of its ancestors, proudly bearing its scars.
Nothing about the petwo ritual was safe.
Indigenous Taino warrior relics, Congolese mountain spirits, colonial whips and whistles and Masonic Christian symbols fused in a ritual that was hot, intentionally harnessing precarious forces, conflicting ideologies, and conflicting energies to substantively alter consciousness.
The question wasn't about clearing individual patterns or processing individual emotions.
The overarching question was, what forces need to be called?
What do the times require?
So let's ask.
What do the times require?
What are our rituals in precarious times?
Are they rituals of pathologization that reinforce the other as the enemy?
Or can it last at last?
Can it last they be rituals that embrace precious precarious paradox?
If you wonder why I'm focusing so much attention in this episode on Yoruban traditions, Afro-Haitian traditions, Afro-Brazilian traditions, it's because these traditions occupy a space that is so thoroughly realized in their own treatment of gradations of consciousness and relationality, and simultaneously stand in glaring juxtaposition to current psychological models of safety, agency, trauma, and alterity.
These are traditions in which spirit governs all.
Spirit determines and delineates ritual space.
Spirit determines safety along its own terms, not ours, and its terms, in the convulsion of the trance and the heat of the beat, look nothing like current discussions around psychological safety.
And it's no accident that these are also the traditions that were most likely to be historically psychologically pathologized.
Because why?
Well, for the obvious reasons.
Because they're African.
Because the rhythms jolt Western minds.
Because the firelight on the faces haunts Western dreams.
Because convulsing bodies speak to a place where we have to let go of individual safety in favor of a much vaster safety.
And to reach that safety has often required being obliterated along the way.
Very little about traditional ritual is safe at all.
We might look at safety as that which doesn't trigger a trauma response.
This is only one vision of safety.
Traditional animus cultures might look at psychology's hyperfocus on the individual as profoundly unsafe, at the fact that there's no sacrificial offering performed as unsafe, at the fact that we don't know how to clear malevolent forces as unsafe.
Safety in these traditions can't be achieved in carving out spaces of vernacular control.
Safety comes through knowing who to feed when, knowing who to call when, comes through the right talismans and adornments, through learning how to dispel thoughts that don't lead anywhere good, through, in the Yoruban traditions, knowing who owns your head, knowing your ori-sha, and cultivating a good long-term relationship with them so that in the ritual circle agency can be turned over altogether at last as we've always longed for it to be.
And within that larger spiritual safety, what another person does or doesn't say doesn't matter very much at all.
The revolution will not be safe at all.
It will be many things, but it will not be safe.
It will breathe hot breath down the back of the neck like an untamed, unwelcome god.
The trance starts with a burning at the nape of the neck.
Something is happening, something beyond control.
Volatility is the very medium of the dance.
In times of precariousness, times of collapse, cultures ritualize access to dangerous spaces instead of attempting to retreat.
For the revolution will not preserve selves or identities or beliefs.
Does the jaguar care what I believe?
Does nature care what I believe?
Does Kali care what I believe?
The revolution will devour us whole, each of us, completely regardless of belief.
In fact, it may come as a surprise in these times of I, Me, and Mine, but the revolution will eat us alive.
The revolution will eat us alive.
Have you heard?
One day nature is going to eat us alive.
One day these bones are going to be worm food.
And a patch of blue forget-me-nots to blossom from my bones there on that high, penitent ridge line.
And possibly blue blossoms to grow from my bones in that brief, glorious alpine summer in which everything is in full flowering, prismatic flowering, and nothing is remotely safe.
In Norse tradition, the apocalypse, the end times, the Ragnarok, arrives specifically because the gods try to extract guarantees of safety from the world.
And when that fails, they pin Trickster underground so that he can't move.
They pin down Loki, immobilize his joints, and if you know myth, you know that trying to immobilize Trickster is probably never a good plan.
We can't wall other opinions out.
We can't wall the different out.
We can't expect everyone to share the same vernacular lens as we do.
Increasingly, discourse seems to want to wall the other out on both sides.
And we need different gods of discourse besides Puritan gods that would see only the demonic in the other.
We need a different aesthetic governing the space of discourse.
We need a fully realized pantheon.
Here's a question.
What gods do we invite close to us with the words that we speak?
What forces do we invoke?
Have we ever considered, for example, that we might have an obligation to the deities that govern aesthetic beauty when we speak words?
How would that change things?
To consider the needs of Aphrodite every time we speak?
The space of modern discourse has become so narrow, a polarized, dichotomized, walled-off fortress of ick.
And we urgently need discourse to expand from this little jail cell to a vibrant capoeira circle or a hip-hop battle.
The hip-hop battle, you know, when people used to be able within a ritually marked circle to be able to air conflict but it was all considered part of the play?
And the aesthetics and the poetics of the play were of the ultimate importance.
It had to be done to the beat.
It had to be done within a flow.
And if it wasn't, then the content of what you said didn't even matter.
And at the end of the day, no one actually meant anyone any harm over it.
And what really mattered was the connection to the underlying aesthetic.
You know what I mean?
You old enough to remember those classic takedowns?
Like when LL Cool J said, or more mythically, or when Cannibus inexplicably decided to pick a fight with LL Cool J with the meekest takedown of all time, saying 99% of your fans wear high heels?
And LL responded with one of the greatest disses ever, 99% of your fans don't exist?
99% of your fans don't exist.
Or this simple diss from the justifiably maligned yet still deeply quotable Kanye West before he lost it completely.
What did Ye say?
He said, I forgot better shit than you ever thought of.
Think of that.
I forgot better shit than you ever thought of.
Remember when takedowns had style?
I mean, really, like how boring is it to tear people down the way people tear each other down these days with psychology terminology?
You're a narcissist, you're dissociative, you're codependent.
So aesthetically boring.
Where's the anima?
Where's the breath of life?
What happened to the aesthetics and play of the hip hop battle?
Like this one from the king of diss, Jay Z.
That's right, sooner or later, Trickster says, I'll take you up on your offer.
Take me down, I'll take you down.
Let's make a game of it.
But somewhere along the line, we lost the game of it.
We lost the aesthetics, the lightness, the play of it.
And these days we have a very unhealthy relationship with the gods of takedowns.
Yes, there are gods of takedowns.
Because takedowns are an inevitable fact of community.
At some point, someone somewhere is going to want to take someone down.
In the Capoeira circle, there are deep protocols to takedowns.
And nothing is more important than the integrity of the circle.
The flow of energy, the alignment to the axé, the breath of life, the prana that moves through the circle.
All of it must be in service to the rhythm, the music, and ultimately all interpersonal conflict must be resolved without breaking the aesthetic of the circle.
In fact, it should enhance it.
The invitation in those takedowns is call and response and conversation and theatrically enacted battle in a way of reinforcing human bonds and bonds with the more than human at once.
Contrast that with people lobbing pathologies at each other on social media.
All life gone.
All aesthetic gone.
All responsibility gone.
All relationality gone.
No humor.
No sense of, at the end of the day we can work this out and go break bread together and I respect you.
I respect you.
I respect you because ultimately no one's better than anyone else.
So here's the mythological thing.
If you're going to try to be Trickster, if you're going to decide to be the god of takedowns on your own, you better be willing to have the trick played on you too.
If you're willing, if I'm willing, to point out others' flaws but I'm not willing to have my flaws pointed out, then I've quickly drifted from Trickster to fascist dictator or cadre leader and the Capoeira circle quickly becomes a struggle session.
You know what a struggle session is?
When everyone points fingers at someone in the town square and shouts out their flaws publicly.
Sound familiar?
Sound like the internet?
The aesthetic of communication spaces is something that traditional cultures have a vernacular for, often an unspoken one, that we in the modern world have a very difficult time understanding.
For what does it mean to have a communication aesthetic in which spirit, the animate, sits right at the center?
And what is of utmost importance is not necessarily individual process or opinion.
What does it mean to honor animacy in group conversation, even in heated discussion?
What does it mean to make space for gods of war and tricksters and goddesses of fierce beauty and huntresses and lunar kings?
To make space for expansions and flows, eddies and currents and all varieties of fluid interplay?
It means a focus off of the immediate utilitarian mechanistic needs of me as an individual unit establishing either my perfection or my brokenness towards a much larger vision.
It means the adoption of a whole panoply of animate considerations, which can sound complicated, but it's most easily summarized like this.
We need to make space for poetry.
We need to make space for poetry.
What happened to poetry in discourse?
For the revolution, the revolution will be poeticized.
Please let it be poeticized.
I look at discourse today and I'm like, where is the poetry?
Tired overused vernacular repeated over and over stifles the flow of the poetic, leaves no space for unexpected revolutionary acts, unpreprogrammed ruptures.
All transpires as the paralyzing virus intends.
Digital buzzwords freeze people in their tracks.
Suddenly it is as if we each have to defend against charges rather than co-create space for a larger life force, a larger aesthetic.
I'd like to see a greater commitment to poetic rhapsodic throwdowns to free us from the cinderblock wall of modern discourse, the eastern block architecture of modern discourse, the struggle session of modern discourse.
For when a movement loses its poetry, it is a dire, dire warning.
So I'll just say it outright.
The language of modern activism is losing its poetry.
Historic movements for social change, Martin Luther King and Gandhi's movements for social change had at their core a spiritual vision.
And in any spiritual tradition that I know of, everything always comes back to how am I walking in the world?
How am I living?
What is the role I'm playing in my own resentments?
Everything comes back to the fact that if I point fingers, as the old saying goes, I've got at least one finger pointing back at myself too.
And so I've got a responsibility to reflect the larger vision of the change that I want to see.
I believe that what is loosely called the left these days, the progressive left, needs a deep spiritual renewal.
A deep reintroduction to the breath of life.
There was a spiritual fervor to these historic movements that allowed for anima to awaken and pass through.
A fervor that is very different than the fervor of finger pointing or the fervor of individual takedowns.
A fervor of spirit.
A glimpse of the promised land, which is us in conjunction with the infinite.
A fervor of alignment to something much larger, within which human concerns, as vital as they are, are also small and transitory in the face of a larger movement.
A justice that is aligned not to immediate individualisms, but to long arcs in the cosmos, primal forces.
This is the ritual architecture, not just human bickering at the center.
Life community in alignment with the great wheels of the cosmos.
So I don't hold a whole lot of sway, but I guess I'm inviting, for whatever it's worth, the progressive movement, the activist world, to examine its relationship with spirit.
With spirit.
And if the immediate response is, well, what is that?
Then the answer is, exactly.
What is that?
What is that?
Spirit.
Anima.
What is that?
What is that mysterious thing that we may have never directly felt, but that is present in the tides of history as it is present in the next breath we take?
What is it?
There are things we must do, Bayo Okomalafé says, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.
Whatever our modality, whatever our framework, let's spark an inquiry into the life breath itself.
Into animacy.
Into how to make space for it to flow through.
Into how our conversation spaces and our therapeutic sessions and our ritual circles and our strategizing workshops can honor a multiplicity of gods.
Hidden gods we've forgotten.
How can we allow the polyvalent dynamism of nature itself to be present, for the non-human world to ring out?
For it does ring out.
It rings out when we make space for it.
Success from an animate perspective may not look like psychological normalcy, like all traumas cleared, like wellness, nor may it necessarily look like showing up for the endless work.
It may not look like one viewpoint or ideology triumphing for one hot minute over another until another one comes around and wrecks that one.
It may look like an ongoing commitment to presence.
It may look like that time I sang instead of speaking.
That I wept instead of singing.
That I poured coconut milk into the sea.
That I mumbled a name that I'd forgotten.
A viable success metric poet Tom Hirons recently told a group of us is if the fibers of the universe start to hum along.
Does that get you to your next immediately articulated conversation or campaign objectives?
No.
What it does is open up space, eventually, for another world to squeeze through just because we made space for it.
Over the breath of life.
And that breath reaches back across oceans of time.
Across meters and rhymes.
Across creatures and kinds.
Across teachers and minds.
Across seekers and signs.
Across flowering vines.
Across spiraling lines.
A breath that resounds with ecstatic shouts and cries beyond doubt that the revolution, the revolution will not be psychologized.
First of all, much praise and adoration due to the song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the 1971 song by Gil Scott-Heron off of the album Pieces of a Man.
Obviously it served as the inspiration for this episode and all respect and love to the great spoken word artist and musician Gil Scott-Heron.
And speaking of musicians, an old friend of mine played some guitar on this episode.
His name is Sonny Reinhart.
One of the best guitarists I know and his current band is called Necrot.
N-E-C-R-O-T.
You know, easy listening type stuff.
Also special thanks to Bayo Okomolafé.
The conversation that I had with him wove its way into this episode in numerous places and then there is going to be a full episode coming on similar topics that is an interview with Bayo.
And as always, this episode contains reference to many songs, books, movies, etc.
These include the song Petro Voodoo Ceremonie Petro by Roots of Haiti, Ceremonie Petro by Voodoo La Friguenine, the book Mama Lola, A Voodoo Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown, The Spirits and the Law, Voodoo and Power in Haiti by Kate Ramsey, The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything, an article in the New York Times, November 12, 2022 by Tara Isabella Burton, Building Resilient Organizations by Maurice Mitchell and The Forge on November 29, 2022, the DSM-5, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association, and its ancient partner the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches, Born of Blood and Fire, an incredible book about the Haitian pet will ritual by Richard Ward and Scarlet Imprint Press, the book Divine Horseman by Maya Deren, Voodoo Music in Haiti, an article by Bettino Lara, The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate, the song Ako-Runo-Shatire by Parvati Baul, and I highly recommend listening to Parvati Baul's music, it's P-A-R-V-A-T-H-Y, and then new word B-A-U-L, the song Ogun Beramar by Kabogla Yaqira, the song Arawa Romiwa and Oshum Omiro, the song Now Beretowa by Carlos Nunez, the song Volto No Mundo Kamara, Zinga Capoeira, volume three, the songs Get Down, Four Three Two One, and The Ripper Strikes Back by LL Cool J, the song Diamonds from Sierra Leone by Kanye West, the song Watch What You Say to Me, T.I. featuring Jay-Z, The White Lotus, the HBO show from Mike White, and of course the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking.
I am rooting for you Aparna.
I don't have much hope, but I am rooting for you.
]]>If what one is seeking is a final, intellectual understanding of ‘how it all works’, then there may be frustration. A view which comprehends the emptiness of all phenomena does not, and cannot, give an ultimately coherent explanation of the functioning of conventional reality in conceptual terms. Any such hypothetical account could only be available from views which reify at least some thing as elementary, including time. In seeking a full explanation then, we may be missing the point of the teaching. For explanation is not the task of emptiness; liberation is.
Conversely though, and as we have suggested before, simply shrugging and declaring ‘unknowing’ too early would also be a mistake. A premature retreat from knowing, before one has probed such mysteries as mutual dependency and the emptiness of time, can only deliver a limited freedom. Unknowing is not in itself, therefore, the point of the path. It is thoroughly knowing voidness that brings a fuller release.
However, at least one of these two tendencies – on the one hand, wanting the ‘clarification’ of a reductionist explanation, and on the other, wanting to abandon concepts too early – is usually very strong for most people. One person may be attached to descriptions of atomized items neatly categorized with their well-delineated functions within a mechanism, and believe such descriptions to be reality. Another may be attached to the concept that all concepts are burdensome and that they block any possibility of opening to reality. Sometimes a practitioner’s tendency careens back and forth over time between these two extremes. More often we each sustain a certain disposition to one or the other. This pair of views and tendencies are like Scylla and Charybdis, and somehow a middle way between them needs to be charted.
Perhaps the most skilful use of the teachings of paṭiccasamuppāda is to regard the terms and the relations between them as offering powerful ways of looking for meditation. What we actually require is just enough clarification to enable us to meditatively work with the map so that it begins to lead beyond its own terms, its own conceptual structure dissolved in the radical freedom and emptiness into which it opens. — Chapter 27, Dependent Origination (2)
For some, of course, initially encountering either a refusal to establish any valid cognition of conventional truth, or a view such as Mipham’s, which establishes it only contextually, may give rise to suspicion and even annoyance. Yet a profound meditative exploration of dependent arising will likely end up with similar sorts of conclusions to those of Mipham, or lead at least to a letting go of the felt need to define valid conventional cognition. At the same time, as we have repeatedly stressed, and as will be obvious to anyone practising this way, the understanding and freedom that are opened bring no irresponsibility with respect to conventional appearances, no behaviour that harms self or other.
Perhaps it could be said that, as beautiful as the inquiry may be, a clinging to wanting to determine what is ‘really and unequivocally there’ on a conventional level simply betrays a mistaken premise of fundamental delusion. Perhaps we may say, with the Buddha, that some questions do not need answers. What matters is the freedom and love that comes from realization of the emptiness of all phenomena. Still, our inquiry into emptiness involves inquiry into appearances; and since cessation is not regarded as the goal, that inquiry may become a kind of open-ended exploration – of ways of looking and the perceptions of their associated appearances. It is not the assumed objectivity status of its appearances at a conventional level, but the blessing and liberation that any way of looking effects that becomes the primary criterion for judging it.
As well as being ultimately pragmatic, the adoption of a core approach of exploring different ways of looking has been concordant with a fundamental and vital insight right from the start. For it is in fact the fundamental openness of things that allows us the possibility to play with ways of looking and to see their effects on the heart and on perception. From the perspective of this approach, the very least that can be said of a view which, understanding that objects, awareness, and ignorance are all empty, does see a world of magical appearances, inseparable from a mind that is ultimately groundless too and beyond time – and does sense all of it thus as ‘holy’, ‘blessèd’, or ‘divine’ – is that such a way of looking sees appearances skilfully. What is opened by a view is what is most important.
In the end, everything is empty. Heart, appearance, way of looking – these too are void, and actually inseparable. With respect to how things appear though, we can acknowledge the primary significance of ways of looking and their effects on the heart, and also some degree of flexibility in perception. At this level, it is certainly clear that the state of the citta shapes and colours perception. But the truth of the converse is easily recognized as well: perception shapes and colours the citta. Understanding all this opens a door. In practice we may, to a degree, shape empty perception in the service of freedom and compassion. When there is insight, we know that how and what we see are not simply givens, but are the colourable and malleable, magical, material of empty appearances.
There is space here, and space for reverence and devotion. When we see the void – the open and groundless nature of all things, the inseparability of appearances and emptiness – we recognize anyway just how profound is our participation in this magic of appearances. Then whether fabrication, which is empty, is consciously intended in a certain direction or not, the heart bows to the fathomless wonder and beauty of it all. It can be touched by an inexhaustible amazement, touched again and again by blessedness and relief. In knowing fully the thorough voidness of this and that, of then and now, of there and here, this heart opens, over and over in joy, in awe and release. Free itself, it knows the essential freedom in everything. — Chapter 31, An Empowerment of Views
]]>In times of great social and political upheaval such as we see in the world today, whatever has been suppressed by the prevailing agreed upon attitudes builds up in—and disturbs—the collective unconscious, accumulating enormous energy that needs to be channeled somewhere. If these contents of the activated unconscious remain suppressed, however, there is a great danger that the unconscious will get into the driver’s seat of our vehicle. There it will, so to speak—destructively, instead of constructively—act out in the world what has been blocked from healthy expression and thereby rendered unconscious. Then we will be truly dreaming a nightmare, as we see in the converging world crises that are engulfing us at this current moment in history.
Oftentimes humanity is not saved from a crisis by the products of our conscious intellect, but rather the saving grace comes from something being revealed to us that emerges unexpectedly as a result of the crisis. Revelations—which can be likened to timeless treasures waiting to be discovered in time—come in many forms and in many ways. Sometimes they first emerge seemingly outside of ourselves through—or are triggered by—some external event in the world like the coronavirus outbreak. Ultimately speaking, however, the deepest revelation is something that lies hidden within the nature of our soul awaiting discovery. We have to reveal it out of and from within ourselves, which is a self-sanctifying act needing no outside validation.
There are treasures buried within us, concealed within our unconscious. These hidden gems are like precious jewels or diamonds in the rough that are encoded within the fabric of the unconscious psyche. They can be conceived of as existing in a higher dimension relative to our conscious mind, and as such, are typically invisible to our intellect. These treasures, having lain buried and dormant in the collective unconscious of our species from time immemorial, are typically awakened in times of great need and duress.
When the time is ripe, our intuition—due to its connection to our unconscious—divines and begins to “see” the heretofore formless revelation that is gestating in the alchemical cauldron of the unconscious. Our task then becomes how to bring forth and creatively express the revelation in a form that helps it come to fruition as we realize it more clearly within ourselves.
The potential revelation can be conceived of as an innovative force of nature alive in the unconscious. This force is thirsting to incarnate both within our minds and into our world. As if a living entity gestating in the womb of the collective unconscious of humanity, this soon to be revelation will draft a suitably creative person—someone who is sensitive to and resonates with the potential revelation—to become the instrument through which the newborn revelation clothes itself. In this, it takes on a particular individualized form and enters into our third-dimensional world.
Our spirit, the sentient presence that animates us, is by its very nature creative. The very center of our being is an unknown creative energy that forges us in its likeness, one way or another (with our cooperation or not). As human beings we are a creative force thirsting for conscious realization. Our creativity isn’t as a mere hobby, a sideline, something that we should just indulge in on our days off. The creative spirit is an essential part of our being, the life-giving oxygen for our soul. Creative expression is not merely the embellishment of the forms of life, but the very dynamic of the life force itself taking new forms. The mysterious secret of our being can only be realized via participating in the creative act itself. Knowing is an act of creation in itself; if we want to know creativity, we have to be creative. There are no holy scriptures for this creative activity—we are left to our own devices. Being creative means to partake in our innate godlike spiritual freedom.
We can conceive of the creative instinct as a timeless, living impulse implanted in the human psyche that moves through the generations. The inspired individual participates within their own soul in the same creative process that takes place outside of themselves in nature. The creative person follows an unknown directive, a higher authority, what Jung would call the Self, the wholeness and guiding force of the deeper personality. People who are inspired by the creative spirit are oriented toward the invisible, toward a mysterious something that wants to become visible and reveal itself. The creative artist is giving utterance to the authentic and direct revelation of the numinosum, which raises their function to the level of the sacred. “The creative principle,” Erich Neumann writes, is typically venerated “as the hidden treasure that in humble form conceals [and, I might add, simultaneously reveals] a fragment of the godhead.”
Wetiko is a “daemonic” energy, which is to say it is a transpersonal energy—beyond the merely personal—that can take over a person (or a group of people). The “daemon” can be envisioned as an indwelling force that can’t be nailed down because of its nomadic nature, taking up residence in those who are receptive to its call. Etymologically speaking, the inner meaning of the word daemon is our guiding spirit, inner voice, internal teacher, muse, spiritual ally, wish-fulfilling genie, and genius. The daemon connects us with our calling, and helps us find our vocation, our mission in life, why we are here on the planet.
The original meaning of the word vocation has to do with being addressed by a voice. In listening to our inner voice—what Jung calls “the voice of the inner man”—we are at the same time given the sacred responsibility to outwardly speak in the world the voice that is uniquely ours to speak—our true authentic voice. The paradox is that in speaking the voice that is most our own, this voice does not belong to us. Rather it is the voice of all of humanity that resounds in us. The truly creative person, be they poet, writer, dancer, or painter, for instance, is that courageous someone, Jung writes, “voicing aloud what others only dream.” In other words, a creative person gives living form to something that exists in the formless and seemingly insubstantial ethers.
The demonic is the creative in statu nascendi, “not yet realized,” or “made real” by a conscious ego. This is to say that hidden encoded within the darkness of wetiko is our unexpressed creativity. When the creativity that naturally bubbles forth within us is suppressed, however, it feeds the poisonous aspect of wetiko. The malady that our species is collectively suffering from is, in essence, the fact that we are not connecting with, mobilizing, and expressing our creative nature. Once our creativity is repressed, the daemonic aspect of wetiko becomes demonic, our creativity turns back on itself and manifests destructively—be it within ourselves or out in the world.
To have eyes and not see—to be blind—is an unmistakable symptom of an occlusion to the call of the creative spirit. The figure of the artist is the one who opens humanity’s eyes, teaching us how to see. The black-hole aspect of wetiko is a creativity-destroyer by its very nature, so we need to generate and mobilize as much ingenuity as possible in order to contend with it. Paradoxically, wetiko both spurns and spurs our creative impulses. The blazing fire of a soul set aflame with its own destiny, burning with the passion of following its deeper calling, fulfilling its mission in life, puts a stake through the heart of the inner vampiric figure of wetiko. The more we pursue what we love, what gives meaning to our lives, the more we allow our creative nature to express itself and the more we “kill” the inner figure of wetiko.
Revelation is not something that the conscious ego could have invented by itself, but can only organically arise out of the tension between a stable consciousness and a charged unconscious. To consciously endure this innate creative tension necessarily involves a state of suffering. Describing the creative individual, Neumann writes, “Only by suffering, perhaps unconsciously, under the poverty of his culture and his time can he arrive at the freshly opening source which is destined to quench the thirst of his time.”
In our own individual suffering of the daemonic energies that pervade and make up the collective unconscious, the spirit within us intimately experiences the profound depths of the woundedness of the collectivity and the time in which we live. Spiritual practitioners and true artists are able to find within their own subjective experience, however, a unique and utterly original response to their wound. As if organs of the collective body politic of humanity, sensitive, spiritually attuned, and creative people are the alchemical retorts in which the poisons, the antidotes, and the psycho-spiritual medicines for the collective are distilled.
It is no badge of honor or measure of sanity to adapt to a world gone mad. Instead of trying to adapt to the world’s insanity, a person who is awakening remains open to the world—and open to their wounds—such that a regenerative and curative power arises from within their own dark depths in response. This healing power is the creative spirit. The creative impulse is simultaneously an individual and collective phenomenon, which is to say that when any of us becomes a channel for this spirit, it serves all of us.
A creative person’s healing power lies in their willingness to not cling to fixed ideas—of who they are or of the world at large—but to allow themselves to be shaped and informed by new experiences of the world. Then, in turn, they are able to translate and craft these experiences into novel “art”-iculations. This involves a receptivity to authentically and imaginatively respond to the reciprocal interactions and continual collisions—with the inevitable wounding—between ourselves and the world. The litmus test for our creativity is our inspired response—or lack thereof—to these experiences.
The hidden treasure, the great revelation that is hidden within our unconscious—also referred mythically as “The Treasure Hard to Attain”—is the creative spirit itself. When tapped into, this spirit is a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration within us that issues forth a stream of revelations like a spring bubbling upward from the depths of our unconscious. This living current—our greatest resource—helps us to connect with our source. Whenever it manifests, this vital spirit appears as a revelation in which we are participating as the instrument through which it incarnates in time and space. Our creativity transforms the world so as to find our place in it. To quote philosopher Martin Heidegger, “A work of art is something new in the world that changes the world to allow itself to exist.”
Our species is desperately in need of the guidance and aid of the boundless creative forces latent within the depths of our unconscious to help us find new ways to resolve the myriad interwoven aspects of our multiple world crises. Creative expression is the zero point at which consciousness and the unconscious momentarily become a generative unity. Only at the point in which the stream of unbridled inspiration emerges from the darkness of the unconscious and enters the light of consciousness, and is thus both at once—darkness and light—is the creative spirit made real in time. As resourceful individuals, it is our job to harness the raw impulses arising from the depths of the unconscious into a form that serves our world. This “creative point,” to again quote Neumann, is “the buried treasure which is the water of life, immortality, fertility, and the after-life all rolled into one.”
It is not the conscious ego that will change the world, but rather, sufficient numbers of people who develop a relationship within themselves between their conscious and unconscious parts who then connect with one another—deepening each other’s inspiration in the process. As long as we remain unaware of the contents of our unconscious—therefore not being able to be the conscious architects of our inner landscape—our ability to transform the outer world will be limited.
Given that our widespread systemic crises are the result of a deficiency in human consciousness, it becomes obvious that it is only through an expansion of consciousness that we will be able to navigate the tight passage before us. Consciousness can evolve and develop, however, only where it preserves and cultivates a living connection with the creative powers of the unconscious. Just as our view of the world is a decisive factor in shaping the unconscious, the forces activated in the unconscious reciprocally transform our conscious perspectives. In its collective archetypal dimension the unconscious contains the wisdom and experience of untold ages and could serve as a guide par excellence for us during these troubled times.
Certain individuals gifted with particularly strong intuition sense the moving currents taking place in the collective unconscious and are able to translate these changes into communicable language (verbal and/or nonverbal). These original expressions can potentially spread rapidly—going viral—and have such powerful transformative power because parallel changes have been taking place in the unconscious of other people. Contagious in its effects, genuine creative expression emerging at the right moment can “virally” spread via the unconscious of our species in ways that can ignite latent, creative energy lying dormant in the collective unconscious of humanity. This can bring forth and actualize hidden possibilities (both within us and in the world) into the light of conscious awareness, which is a process that has the power to effect real change in the world.
A new idea is itself an expression of a creative act. Certain ideas can assist us in remembering something that we had forgotten we had forgotten. A new idea—such as wetiko—can set up a chain reaction in people’s minds that can potentially unleash previously unimagined insight and creativity. As part of their design, mind-expanding ideas are meant to be shared with others so as to fully activate their nonlocal benefit and blessing. These ideas endlessly increase in potency the more they are shared among us. Like a key unlocking a door or like a charm that breaks a spell, a new symbolic idea can unleash the dormant creative spirit imprisoned within us. A revolutionary idea has the potential to catalyze revolutions in thinking; a shift in a single idea can precipitate a shift into a new epoch.
The creativity of the unconscious psyche—which is an agency in a state of never-ending re-creation and re-formation—continually transforms our experience of reality as well as itself. As an artist of life, we are what Neumann refers to as a “bearer of the divine miracle,” actively and endlessly participating in re-creating ourselves anew, revealing ourselves—to ourselves—through the bringing forth of our gifts to the world. Only in these acts do we actualize our wholeness. Acting out of our wholeness is like kryptonite to the seeming superpowers of wetiko. In being creative we not only find refuge from the dangers of wetiko, but we discover the true revelation that is none other than ourselves. Each new act of creativity brings with it an element of self-discovery. We must create in order to know ourselves.
When human beings are deprived of their freedom and power of expression, however, they will unconsciously express themselves in the drive for power. This only feeds the will to power of the demonic and destructive shadow, with the baneful consequences we see in the world today. Being oppressed in our expression, instead of stopping us cold, however, can potentially—if we so choose—fuel our creative fire, forging in us an “inner necessity” to connect with the living primal generative spirit that lives within us. The authentic creative spirit—if it’s the real thing—can’t be discouraged or kept down for long, for then it wouldn’t be creative.
To quote poet Allen Ginsberg, “The warfare’s psychic now. Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.” Instruments of war in the hands of generals are extremely dangerous. In the same way, nothing is more dangerous and potentially world-transforming than implements of creative expression in the hands of artists. They are the molders of the unconscious psychic life of humanity, the mythmakers of their age. It is the artists—and we are all artists—who are the healers of the world.
Rather than letting our perceptions be managed and manipulated by the powers that be and their propaganda organs, we as sovereign beings can connect with our own perceptions and create our own unique and authentic experience of the world and a refreshed experience of ourselves. What a radical—and truly liberating—idea!
Healing wetiko entails each of us becoming an empiricist—there is no getting around this. In this we must simply inquire directly into the nature of our present moment experience, without giving credence to what any outer authority is telling us is true. Ultimately speaking, we ourselves are the arbiters of our own experience. By our very nature, we are interpreters of our experience and generators of meaning. This is a process that affects our experience of both ourselves and of the universe at large. Realizing our own creative agency is where we find ourselves, which is the beginning of the cure for wetiko as well as the cure itself.
Once we creatively express our nature, it is nature itself that is doing the talking. Then there’s nothing to do but listen and respond in kind to our unique and individual call.
]]>You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight –
and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Lunarpunk first rose to the attention of the web3 community via the essay Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle by @lunar_mining in February 2022.
Despite a note there that lunarpunk is "the solar shadow-self", the author goes on to define lunarpunk overwhelmingly in terms of privacy, anonymity and a "conflict between crypto and existing power structures".
In this piece I seek a broader notion of lunarpunk, returning to the idea of the "solar shadow-self" and exploring lunarpunk in its most general form as the dark side of solarpunk, a complementary opposite.
I identify privacy/anonymity as just one of Seven Darknesses of Lunarpunk, each with an associated (psycho)technology: the Darknesses of Privacy, Attention, Suffering, Eros, Plants, Soul and Light.
Lunarpunks understand that there is nothing inherently bad or wrong about the dark, and to speak of darkness is not to suggest the sinister. Rather, the commonality between the tools, techniques and technologies featured here is an association with the unconscious, the shadow or the taboo.
Key technology: cryptography, as explored in Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle by @lunar_mining
"Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem." — Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
"What’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption.. It doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation." — The Network State
Lunarpunks are masters of cryptography. They understand how pseudonymity grants not just freedom of speech, but freedom after speech.
Edit: I appreciate this distinction between privacy and anonymity by @lunar_mining
The agora is all activity outside the state.
— 𝖝𝖊𝖓𝖔 ⛛ 🕊️ (@lunar_mining) December 2, 2022
In the lunarpunk future, the agora expands. The state is overcome. Dark forests of encryption become primary.
Protected by cypher-foliage, self-governing squads are free to define their destinies. pic.twitter.com/skCHETT6Xv
Key psychotechnology: mastering of submissive/dominant attention, as explored by Kasia Urbaniak
"I understood that both the Taoist nuns and dominatrices I most admired were powerful precisely because they could control that conversation under the conversation—and it wasn’t through a self-conscious manipulation of their body language. Instead, they did so with something far more powerful and primal: their attention.
What I had been learning in the desert, in the dojo, and in the dungeon, then, could be summed up this way: the art of attention. Attention dictates where the energy is—the juice, the qi, the life force—in any given interaction. It is how our animal bodies communicate with one another. Language is important; so are physical gestures. But more important than both is where the attention is directed." — Unbound
Lunarpunks are masters of attention, both submissive (inward) and dominant (outward). They practise a dominance that has nothing to do with the violent, toxic mimic of power we see so often in the world, and a submission that is never obsequious or subservient. Rather, in both states, they and those around them experience a deep sense of relaxation and flow.
Key psychotechnology: Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious… Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate." ― C.G. Jung
"It's impossible to desire something without also fearing it a bit, and it's impossible to fear and dislike something without also desiring it." — Existential Kink
Lunarpunks are highly attuned to their fears, aversions and dislikes, and see all of these as an opportunity for growth. They understand the freedom that comes from acknowledgement of the taboo, the disowned and the repressed.
Key psychotechnology: harnessing the Light/Dark Masculine/Feminine as explored by ISTA
"The DARK FEMININE: sensual pleasure, erotic wisdom, emotional fluidity, and naked authenticity. This energy has a sexual sovereignty, the capacity to attract/magnetize, and the willingness to feel everything, even the most apparently ugly, desperate, and suffering parts of life. The shadow expression is manipulation, power games, chaoticness, vengeance, and emotionally explosive. The stunted version is frigidity (rejection or judgment of sensual and sexual pleasure), and emotionally, physically or sexually detached." — A Brief Introduction to The Cross
Lunarpunks healthily express all four archetypes of the dark/light masculine/feminine cross. In particular, they understand the distinction between evil, shadow and darkness and have harnessed the dark energies for good.
Key psychotechnology: plant medicine, especially ayahuasca ("vine of death") as practised by the Shipibo
"Ayahuasca is not a recreational drug taken for entertainment, relaxation, or escapism. The medicine does not allow us to suppress issues and escape reality. In fact, quite the opposite is typically the case. Ayahuasca compels us to face, resolve, and release issues that have been buried throughout our lives." — Temple of the Way of Light
"The fact that Westerners will seek out a foul-tasting jungle medicine in a faraway environment and culture, a medicine that frequently leads to violent purging and can include terrifying visions, is a remarkable paradox." — Ralph Metzner
Lunarpunks are intimately familiar with the healing power of plant medicines, particularly those used in night-time ceremonies. They embrace mystery and approach indigenous wisdom with respect and humility, accepting the possibility of mechanisms not yet understood by science.
Key psychotechnology: Soulcraft by the Animas Valley Institute
"In the course of healthy human development, we are each meant to reach this breakpoint, this crisis, this divide beyond which we’re no longer able to decisively define ourselves in terms of social or romantic relationships, or in terms of a job or career, a creative or artistic project, a political affiliation, a theory or philosophical perspective, a religious or ethnic membership, or a transcendental spiritual goal. We are propelled — compelled! — toward an underworld self-definition, a soul-infused experience of meaning and purpose and identity. True for all humans, this is our evolutionary birthright, a necessary passage on the way from psychological adolescence to true adulthood… The mainstream currents of our contemporary cultures neither assert nor deny the existence of an underworld identity; it has simply disappeared from awareness." — Bill Plotkin
Lunarpunks are practitioners of Soulcraft, seeking to become ever more aware of their unique mythopoetic identity through the Descent to Soul. Soulcraft practices include dreamwork and deep-imagery journeys, solo ceremonies and exercises while wandering on the land, trance dancing and drumming, council work, storytelling, vision fasts, symbolic artwork, soul-oriented poetry, Shadow work, and communicating with birds, trees, the winds, and the land and waters.
Key psychotechnology: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising as explored in Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea
"They are the same thing, but our lazy mind separates darkness from light. To plunge into the light, to find darkness in light, to find Buddha nature in perfect zazen is our way." — Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Through meditative practice, lunarpunks approach the understanding that ultimately, there is no separation between darkness and light – rather, they are 'dependently arising' (paṭiccasamuppāda).
Every characterisation of lunarpunk in this piece is simply an opinion (mine), an offering – I make no claim to the right to define the term any more than the next 'punk.
What is clear to me, though, is that lunarpunk existed before web3 and exists beyond it. I hope this piece stimulates useful discussions on holistic and developmentally-focused notions of both solarpunk and lunarpunk in the web3 space and beyond.
May we continue to move towards wholeness, embracing both dark and light 🌓
]]>New blog post – Beyond Privacy: The Seven Darknesses of Lunarpunk:
— Stephen Reid ☯️ (@lunarpunk_0x) September 30, 2022
Darkness of Privacy
Darkness of Attention
Darkness of Suffering
Darkness of Eros
Darkness of Plants
Darkness of the Soul
Darkness in Lighthttps://t.co/MiGa5vHLF1
Coaching sometimes seems like Keats’ rainbow – the more we try to define it, dissect it, classify it and demystify it, the more we diminish it and lose its essence. One of the concerns both of us have about so much of the coaching literature is that it represents attempts to confine coaching within the partisan wrappings of a particular school, philosophy or approach. Such narrow and sometimes self-serving perspectives seem to us to be completely at odds with the essential ethos of coaching – enquiring, open, inclusive, subtle and multi-perspective. This perspective has been called ‘relational coaching’ by Erik de Haan and colleagues (de Haan, 2008).
At the same time, we accept and encourage the notion of quality in coaching, even though we may struggle even more in defining what that, too, means. Ingredients in a definition of quality of coaching might be posited to include:
Our observations of many coaches in and out of action in the context of coach assessment centers suggests that it may be easier to define what does not define quality – for example:
Our reflections to reconcile the spontaneity, dynamism and variety of coaching with the need to maintain standards lead to the conclusion that simplistic classifications are likely to be divisive and of dubious validity. What’s needed is a conceptual framework that reflects the evolution of complexity in coaches’ way of thinking about themselves, their clients and the context, in which they operate.
A possible solution may lie in the context of maturity. In the sense of the development of human beings, a number of authors have proposed models of the evolution of maturity. These models broadly assume that changes in the structure of thinking about oneself and the world, with which we interact, evolve slowly and in recognisable, sequential patterns; that higher levels involve a greater degree of awareness about the individual’s environment, and greater complexity in how they interpret their environment; that evolving through one level is an essential precursor to the next; that cognitive and socio-emotional responses at earlier levels may remain open and available, even though the individual’s “centre of gravity” is at a higher level; that people evolve at different rates; and that only a small proportion of the population become centred in the highest levels of maturity. These models tend to emphasize either cognitive-reflective processes or ego-development (Bachkirova and Cox, 2007), meaning “the development of self-identity and maturing of interpersonal relationships”. Key authors here include Torbert (1991), Wilber (2000), Cook-Greuter (2004), Beck & Cowan (1996) and Kegan (1992).
As Bachkirova and Cox express it: “What is particularly important in relation to development of coaches is that each stage enriches individual capacity for reflection and effective interaction with others. Their ability to notice nuances and details of situations is increasing. The resultant self-awareness gives them a better opportunity to articulate, influence and potentially change these situations.” Otto Laske (2006, 2009), who has built in particular upon Kegan’s approaches, maintains additionally that in a coaching context the relative maturity of the coach and client are significant in the relationship dynamic. Most importantly, if the coach is less cognitively or socio- emotionally mature than the client, this is likely to have a significant and negative impact on the quality of the coaching process. Chandler and Kram (2005) make a similar point with regard to the related activity of mentoring.
Our own interpretations of coach maturity are not based on empirical research, but we hope they will stimulate such research and serve as a starting point for debate. Our model derives from observation in a variety of contexts, but particularly within coach assessment centers, where it is possible to benchmark coaches against consistent criteria, and hence to reflect on characteristics and thinking patterns exhibited by coaches of different levels of demonstrated competence. It is important to emphasise here that we are not equating maturity and competence as the same construct. However, it is reasonable to conclude that they are closely related.
The four levels are models-based, process-based, philosophy or discipline-based, and systemic eclectic. Models-based coaches are often very new to the field and seek the re-assurance of a closely defined approach that they can take into any situation they might meet. This type of coaching is characterised by mechanistic conversations, where following the model is more important than exploring the client’s world. It is about doing rather than being and tends to be about coaching to the client than coaching with the client; and about the coaching intervention, rather than the coaching relationship. The dangerous myth that a good coach can coach anyone in any situation appears to stem from this very narrow perception of coaching.
Process-based approaches allow for more flexibility. They can be considered as a structured linking of related techniques and models. The coach has a number of specific tools to use in helping the client’s thinking, but the toolbag is still relatively limited. Solutions focus, for example, assumes that the client’s immediate need is to find a solution, but in practice, many clients simply want to build a greater understanding of their situation and/or to come to terms with a problem that is inherently insoluble. Yet there are many coaching situations where the emotional engagement between coach and client provides the most powerful resource for change.
Philosophy or discipline based mindsets tend to offer a wider still portfolio of responses to client needs, because they operate within a broad set of assumptions about helping and human development. They can still be applied mechanistically, however. What prevents them being so is the coach’s ability to reflect on his or her practice, both while coaching and after each coaching session.
The fourth, most liberating mindset is the systemic eclectic. These coaches have a very wide array of ways of working and a toolkit amassed from many sources, both within couching and from very different worlds. They have integrated this into a self- aware, personalized way of being with the client. They exhibit an intelligent, sensitive ability to select a broad approach, and within that approach, appropriate tools and techniques, which meet the particular needs of a particular client at a particular time. This relates to what Webb (2008) calls coaching for wisdom.
Observation of and discussion with a sample of systemic eclectic coaches suggests that:
Table 1: A comparison of the four levels of coaching maturity in coaching conversations
Coaching approach | Style | Critical questions |
---|---|---|
Models-based | Control | How do I take them where I think they need to go? How do I adapt my technique or model to this circumstance? |
Process-based | Contain | How do I give enough control to the client and still retain a purposeful conversation? What’s the best way to apply my process in this instance? |
Philosophy-based | Facilitate | What can I do to help the client do this for themselves? How do I contextualise the client’s issue within the perspective of my philosophy or discipline? |
Systemic eclectic | Enable | Are we both relaxed enough to allow the issue and the solution to emerge in whatever way they will? Do I need to apply any techniques or processes at all? If I do, what does the client context tell me about how to select from the wide choice available to me? |
Observation in coach assessment centers gave us the basis for proposing an approach, which does more closely parallel other models of maturation. Areas where mature coaches demonstrate that they have reflected deeply include:
Although ontology has developed specific meaning as a genre of coaching practice, in the more generic sense of coaching as “being about being”, mature coaches tend to reflect more deeply on the nature of the interaction between themselves and their clients. Their reflections lead them to an understanding of this interaction that goes far beyond textbook explanations of the coaching process, whether these derive from models-based, process-based or discipline-based approaches.
They integrate their learning from such sources, with reflection on their experiences with clients, to develop and articulate a unique and personal perspective of the coaching dynamic. Some parallels can be drawn here with Kegan’s stages of adult maturity (1992). Absorbing values and beliefs of others – accepted wisdom – whether consciously or unconsciously, is perhaps typical of Kegan’s level three. As they mature, coaches question these “given” beliefs and begin to develop their own, self-authored perspectives, based on their own experience and reasoning. This suggests Kegan’s level four. Some go a step further, challenging their own self-focused assumptions, embracing uncertainties and letting go of any sense of needing to exert control over the conversation. For example, they may see coaching as a process of shared meaning making, in which the client’s values and perspectives have equal validity to their own.
One of the most pernicious myths about coaching is that coaches need no contextual knowledge of the client’s world. Whether born of self-aggrandizement or a mechanistic view of coaching, this is manifestly untrue, on two counts – client safety (and hence ethicality) and efficacy. In sports coaching, it is important to know enough to ensure that the client is not led to adopt behaviors, which might be detrimental to themselves. Similarly in the business world, a coach working with top managers, who has poor knowledge of corporate governance rules, poses a risk both to the client and to him or herself.
From an efficacy perspective, the coach has to have enough contextual knowledge first to demonstrate empathy and build rapport and credibility with the client. Secondly, construct questions that stimulate significant insight.
Coach assessment observations show clearly that the most effective coaches ask questions and make supportive comments that demonstrate:
Of course, having too close an understanding of the client’s world also has its downsides. In particular, it leads the coach instinctively to come up with their own answers and suppressing these may divert attention from listening to the client. Mature coaches work to give up a directive, “I’ve been there” approach. It seems, from observation, that the most effective coaches are often those, who have enough knowledge to contextualize questions, yet are able to maintain a deep, curious and constructive naiveté.
Systemic eclectic coaches give themselves permission to do less, with resultant great efficacy. In classroom experiments, we have artificially limited the number of times coaches can speak, to only once in every 10 minutes, on average. In almost all cases, coaches’ and coachees’ perception of the quality of the dialogue and, in particular, of the questions asked, is higher than under normal conditions. Our observation of systemic eclectics is that they are almost miserly with their questions, giving the client maximum time for reflection before they will nudge them gently along in their thinking.
Although all the major coaching professional bodies require member coaches to have some form of coach supervision or mentoring, remarkably few coaches seem to have developed a mental model that embraces supervision as a core activity in their practice. For many, it appears to be a tick the box requirement, with little proactivity and little practical relevance to their development as coaches. Peer coaching, in particular, can become a collusive, self-congratulatory activity.
We have very little evidence with regard to how coaches at different levels of maturity approach supervision, but we can posit that there might be differences in:
We suspect – but do not yet have evidence to support – that mature coaches would tend to have more developed, more proactive approaches to coach supervision and mentoring. Certainly, in assessment centers, more mature coaches tend to give clearer, more specific responses to all of the seven issues above. From comments by systemic eclectics, we glean a number of possible differentiators, which include:
What might a mature approach towards self-development as a coach look like? Based on a small sample of systemic eclectics, they might exhibit:
You don’t have to be a psychologist to recognise phenomena such as projection, dependency or sociopathy. But you do need at least some understanding of psychological and behavioural processes. Assessment centres have, however, revealed some very dangerous coaches, who have little appreciation of boundaries. For example, the coach, who claimed to have done 4000 hours of coaching, but could not think of a single occasion when he had met a boundary issue!
Common to all theories of maturity is a sense of progression. Inherent in the concept of wisdom is the use of reflection to raise awareness of both current and precursor states. Integral to the assessment centre design is a description of the coach’s learning journey – how they make current sense of their evolution towards their current level of practice. For many, the learning journey appears to have begun and ended with a certificate or other formal recognition as a coach. Their practical experience with clients has largely reinforced the “given” knowledge, rather than inspired them to question it.
Further along the maturity spectrum, we extrapolate, coaches are able to articulate critical shifts in their awareness of themselves as coaches, of the coach-client relationship and of the coaching process. A little further along again, they are able to describe – albeit often with hesitancy – where the journey appears to be taking them. It seems that, as with other maturity models, they are aware that the centre of gravity of their maturity level is shifting and they are searching for client opportunities, insights and pivotal conversations that will assist that movement, even if their vision of where it will take them is still somewhat hazy.
It is arguable that all coaches are better suited to some clients and situations than others. Key factors here may be:
Coaches bring different kinds of life experience, and corporate buyers tend to place a higher value on coaches who have client credibility by virtue of their own experience at senior executive level. (However, assessment center data suggest that a high level of experience in management, when not accompanied by a high level of coaching maturity, represents poor value for money and may sometimes do more harm than good.)
For many coaches Rogers’ (1961) conception of a fully functioning person may describe the coach’s perception of what it means to be human. Many ex-executives have a much more business–like model. Whatever model one has, it is useful to articulate it, so that clients know where the coach is coming from and the coach realises that views or hints about what the client might do or aspire to, come from a position rather than appearing out of thin air.
So how can and do coaches mature into systemic eclectics? One ingredient is likely to be time. Malcolm Gladwell (2008) summarises research into exceptional performance in a range of activities from business to sport and suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in any field. Certainly, all the systemic eclectics we have observed have been involved with coaching – or with related disciplines – for a good many years. But putting in the hours does not automatically create mastery – there has additionally to be an immense amount of reflection, experimentation and adaption of practice.
For systemic eclectics, we observe that the learning they acquire shows them how much more they could learn. It’s like climbing a mountain – the higher you ascend, the bigger and more distant the horizon. Feeling comfortable with this diminishing perspective of one’s own importance and competence relative to what might conceivably be possible, requires a great deal of personal maturity, we suspect.
If there is one characteristic of systemic eclectics, which can potentially be learned and used by coaches at any level of maturity – and can possibly speed the transition between levels – it is this ability to savour where you are, to contextualise it and to be able to look both forwards and backwards along the path. Accepting and valuing your current state may be the critical component in achieving the next level of maturity.
]]>"The word ‘platform’ is often used to describe an internet service which brings together suppliers and consumers in an online marketplace. But platforms don’t necessarily provide traditional ‘products’; they often facilitate the trade of services, like taxis or temporary accommodation. Most people have heard of Uber and Airbnb, whose platforms have disrupted the minicab and short-term lettings industries while generating enormous profits for their shareholders."
— An introduction to platform co-ops
"The rise of the platform economy over the last decade promised to boost flexible employment, extra income, and collaborative consumption. Instead, the ‘disruption’ of the digital economy has removed regulations, increased precariousness of work, and created the conditions for market monopolies dominated by a handful of digital giants."
"More and more people are organising their work and resources through digital platforms. The marketplace for these is dominated by a small number of large corporations: be it Uber drivers, freelancers on TaskRabbit or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace, home rentals on Airbnb or food deliveries using Deliveroo.
These digital platforms offer people unprecedented flexibility and independence. The barriers to entry to becoming a taxi driver, a holiday apartment landlord, or freelance worker are now incredibly low, and it’s never been easier to be a consumer on the other side of these markets. But while these positives are acknowledged, large platform companies have also been criticised for being exploitative, monopolistic and extractivist.
As a result, this system has been described as platform capitalism. In this system a large number of consumers and vendors generate profits which accrue to a comparatively small number of people… Ordinary users who rely on these platforms typically find they have little control over their personal data and have no say about how they are run. It has led to the formation of monopolies that encourage financial extraction and the monetisation of personal data."
— Platform co-operatives – solving the capital conundrum, Why we need platform co-operatives in the digital economy
"A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a computing platform, and uses a website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders."
— Platform and Data Co-Operatives Amidst European Pandemic Citizenship
"A platform co-op is a digital platform that is designed to provide a service or sell a product, and that is collectively owned and governed by the people who depend on and participate in it."
— Platform co-operatives – solving the capital conundrum, The origins of platform co-operatives
"Just like traditional co-ops, platform co-ops are organisations that are owned and managed by their members. While traditional co-ops are normally based around a physical community of members, platform co-ops live online and are normally populated by online communities of members."
— An introduction to platform co-ops
"A workers’ co-op [is] a business owned and managed collectively by its workers for their mutual benefit. It’s organised democratically and fairly by (and only by) its members."
— Seeds for Change: How to set up a Workers' Co-op
Stocksy United provides curated stock photography and video footage with almost 1000 photographer member-owners, across 63 countries. The members license creative content and receive 50% royalties on standard license sales and 75% on extended license sales – they also receive dividends which equated to $300,000 in 2016 on $10.7m in sales.
Up & Go is a platform that offers on-demand cleaning services at guaranteed fair wages launched by four worker co-operatives, based in New York City. The worker-owned cleaning businesses, which are all majority women owned, earn 95% of the cost of every Up & Go cleaning job. The remaining 5% supports the costs to maintain the platform.
"Multi-stakeholder cooperatives are co-ops that formally allow for governance by representatives of two or more “stakeholder” groups within the same organization, including consumers, producers, workers, volunteers or general community supporters. Rather than being organized around a single class of members the way that most cooperatives are, multi-stakeholder cooperatives enjoy a heterogeneous membership base. The common mission that is the central organizing principle of a multi-stakeholder cooperative is also generally broader than the kind of mission statement needed to capture the interests and benefits of only a single stakeholder group, and will often reflect the interdependence of interests of each stakeholder group in its articulation."
"Rather than being organised around a single class of members the way that most co-operatives are, a multi-stakeholder co-operative is any co-op that draws its membership from two or more different classes of stakeholders. After two decades of local experimentation, Italy was the first country to adopt a multi-stakeholder statute in 1991. Over 14,000 ‘social co-ops’ now exist across Italy and provide social care, health and educational services to over 5 million people. In Quebec, home to one of the most productive and vibrant co-operative development sectors in the world, multi-stakeholder co-ops are now the fastest growing type of co-op, with more than 50% of all new co-ops opting to register what they refer to as ‘Solidarity Coops.’ The movement is just getting here in the UK, but there are now over 20 multi-stakeholder co-ops who have incorporated using the Somerset Rules."
— Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives - P2P Foundation
"Multi-stakeholder cooperatives present a departure in ownership structure from the more familiar consumer-owned and worker-owned co-ops. Also known as solidarity co-ops, hybrid co-ops or social co-ops, multi-stakeholder cooperatives welcome a variety of groups to become owners, including employees, producers, customers and clients, and community members (including investors). These co-ops may appear to operate similarly to corporations, but as Shareable’s David Boiler points out, while they have “a keen focus on profit and loss, social co-ops are committed to meeting social goals such as healthcare, eldercare, social services, and workforce integration for former prisoners. They are able to blend market activity with social services provisioning and democratic participation, all in one swoop.”"
— Multi-stakeholder co-operatives - USDN
Resonate is a stream-to-own music platform harnessing blockchain technology. It is a multi-stakeholder co-operative giving democratic control to artists (45%), listeners (35%) and workers (20%). Through its model, it pays up to 2.5 times more revenue to artists than other streaming services.
Equal Care Co-op are building a new, co-owned social care platform that puts care givers and receivers in charge. By incorporating as a multi-stakeholder co-operative, their digital product and accompanying service is owned by and accountable to the communities using and sustaining it. They arrived at the platform co-op model as a response to systemic inequities within the social care system, seeing it as a practical route to centering choice, power and ownership with the two most important people in care – the person giving and the person getting support.
Supported member: You are being regularly supported by Equal Care Co-op (whether that's voluntary or paid support) Advocate member: Your relative or friend is being supported by Equal Care Co-op but they cannot be a Member themselves. |
Investor member: You support our aims and have invested in our Community Share Offer. |
Worker member: You are regularly contributing your labour to Equal Care Co-op, whether that's paid or voluntary work. |
"Launched in 2009, the Somerset Rules were one of the UK’s first set of model rules for a multi-stakeholder co-op, and they’re arguably still the best. Packed full of best practice gleaned from decades of co-operative development experience, they’re structured to closely follow co-op principles, written in relatively plain English, and are cleverly drafted to allow for a wide range of different configurations. You can define the percentage of overall control each stakeholder group has. They are also ‘social accounting ready’ and are designed to enable the widest range of options for financing. In 2012 they were fully revised and overhauled and a version for use as a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee was developed."
— P2P Foundation: Somerset Rules
(Check out the latest version at Somerset Rules registrations)
"If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction."
Today I gave a talk on the topic Psychedelics and the Living Planet to the Cambridge Psychedelic Society. You can check out the notes I used here.
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