Spaciousness: How to Free Your Mind and Stop Living Reactively

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Jordan Bates

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Viktor Frankl

‘Spaciousness’ is a Buddhist concept that has been profoundly useful and liberating for me.

Perhaps it will prove nourishing for you as well.

Spaciousness feels like having more space in your mind.

It feels like widening the space between stimulus and response, such that you can stop living in reaction and begin responding skillfully to reality.

David Chapman on Spacious Freedom

A couple years ago while perusing David Chapman’s remarkable work, I happened upon an intriguing post on ‘Spacious Freedom.’ [1]

Reading it, I was struck by the clarity and conciseness with which David articulated the powerfully liberating Buddhist concept of ‘spaciousness.’

The post was one of the most concentrated doses of wisdom I’ve ever absorbed, and I’d like to share its essence with you.

I’ll let David take over:

“‘Spaciousness’ is freedom from fixed meanings. Spaciousness liberates you from automatic interpretations, and from habitual responses.

Lacking spaciousness, here is the pattern of life:

Something happens

You perceive the event

You immediately interpret it, based on some familiar framework of meaning-making

An emotion arises in response to the meaning you have given

The energy of the emotion demands action

You do something that seems mandatory based on the emotional interpretation

This is unnecessarily limited at steps 3 and 6:

There may be other ways to interpret the event. And it may not be helpful to interpret it at all.

There may be other ways to react to the emotional energy. And it may not be helpful to react at all.

Spaciousness is an attitude: the willingness to suspend the process of meaning-making. Spaciousness is the willingness to allow unknowing, uncertainty, confusion, ambiguity, meaninglessness.

Spaciousness values astonishment, perplexity, and groundlessness. Spaciousness gives experience a quality of freshness: every situation appears unique, not merely as another instance of a familiar category.”

Spaciousness is closely related to cultivating a Beginner’s Mind: a mind that is wide open, non-rigid, non-dogmatic, ready to receive the raw, vivid reality of each moment without immediately judging, filtering, and categorizing it based on preexisting beliefs.

Non-reactive spacious awareness is freedom. The experience of gaining spaciousness is the experience of increasingly feeling that you can choose how to interpret events and choose how to respond to emotional energy, rather than being a slave to habitual patterns.

It is not easy to attain a state of wide-open spaciousness, but it is easy to begin walking the path of cultivating more spaciousness.

You can do this simply by beginning to observe yourself closely. Observe how your automatic reactions and habitual interpretations create your reality. Observe how it would be possible to create a different reality by loosening your grip on your default reactions.

A Story: Flat Tire

Let’s say a person’s car suddenly gets a flat tire.

A person deep in self-pity and resentment will reactively start telling themselves a story like: “God dammit, why does this shit always happen to me? I swear this universe just fucking hates me. Everything is out to get me. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nothing goes my way.”

This will reinforce their habitual response to reality—that of viewing themselves as a pitiable victim and scanning their environment for evidence to confirm this story.

A spacious, awakened, deeply peaceful person, on the other hand, might respond internally like this: “Ah, I see that this is happening now. Okay. I’ll have to change the tire and will be running a bit later than expected. This could be a fine chance to get some fresh air, appreciate the setting sun, maybe meditate a little. Perhaps this change of timing will have some happy results; we never know what things are good for, after all.”

This simple example illustrates how our state of being and mode of perception create our reality. The very same situation can be experienced as night-and-day different by two people in dramatically different states of being.

This points to the possibility of liberation; it suggests the massive quantity of suffering we can transcend by cultivating a spacious way of being.

Stop Creating “Good” and “Bad”

“… the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

A wise woman told me that the root of all our problems is the mental process of judging some experiences as “good” and others as “bad,” some as desirable and others as undesirable.

This dichotomy becomes a torture chamber.

To cultivate spaciousness, I find it useful to practice not judging events, experiences, emotions as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ desirable or undesirable.

Practice seeing whatever is happening as simply ‘what is happening now,’ and trust that whatever is happening is workable, manageable, and likely contains hidden lessons or gemstones.

“Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

As you begin to practice this, you’ll find that it’s very difficult, as we’re heavily conditioned to dichotomize the content of our reality into that which is desirable and that which is undesirable.

When we do this, though, we suffer. A lot. If one feels anger, fear, or guilt, yet remains neutral about these things and simply experiences them, they wouldn’t be so difficult. They may even be useful; they may teach us about ourselves. There is nothing wrong with experiencing negativity; this is a universal aspect of the human experience.

But when we experience such things and immediately condemn ourselves for experiencing them, grit our teeth and resist them, and concoct a self-judging story about them that we keep replaying in our minds, we pour kerosene on the fire and make everything feel exponentially worse.

A spacious person will still experience pain in life, as this is unavoidable; but they will suffer far less by responding more skillfully to their pain.

Stop Thinking and End Your Problems

Nothing is inherently a problem; the mind makes it so.

This is why, 2,500 years ago, Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Stop thinking and end your problems.”

To be sure, we need to think sometimes, but the vast majority of humanity’s mental activity is not helpful; it’s often downright insidious.

When you begin to watch closely, you increasingly notice how the mind is the source of all “problems.”

When you drop your narratives about reality and focus on the sensory data of this moment, “problems” dissolve.

The essence of meditation is to come into a state of deep presence and see clearly the traps of the monkey mind by observing its neurotic movements with openness, gentleness, non-judgment, compassion, and humor. This practice increases spaciousness.

One can do this through forms of sitting meditation, such as focus meditation: Dropping one’s mental stories about reality and simply following the breath, or repeating a mantra, or focusing on the energy of aliveness coursing through the body. The mind will doubtlessly try to pull you away; this is perfectly okay; this is how you learn to see its funny tricks; you simply smile at it then return to the breath, mantra, the aliveness of the body, or another object of focus.

Or, you can practice choiceless awareness: Simply sitting in open awareness, watching thoughts, feelings, phenomena arise but not clinging to them, not choosing one thing over another, allowing all things to drift past like leaves on the breeze. This becomes easier when you begin to see that you are not your thoughts.

One can also practice cultivating spaciousness at any time in day to day life, by observing closely how your conditioned mental-emotional system reacts to reality, conjures up over-dramatic stories about it, and gets you in trouble by ‘hooking’ you into this drama.

You can then practice dropping your stories and simply feeling the energy in your body, allowing it to be just what it is without judging it, and watching it gradually run its course and dissolve. Through this process you begin to un-learn your automatic interpretations/reactions. A lighter way of being becomes possible.

Parting Words: Spacious Flow

“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”

— Chuang Tzu

Much more could be said about spaciousness, but hopefully this introduction has been useful and curiosity-inducing for you.

Meditation—gently observing the mind and non-judgmentally feeling whatever you are feeling—is the key to unlocking ever greater degrees of spaciousness.

If you feel drawn to dive deeper into meditation, I highly recommend reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle; Letting Go by David Hawkins; and taking our self-liberation course, 30 Challenges to Enlightenment.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Zen stories. I have a tattoo on my arm that says “we’ll see,” a reference to this story. Ponder how the protagonist in this story embodies spaciousness:

A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”

The man just said, “We’ll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses following. The man and his son corralled all twenty-one horses.

His neighbors said, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”

The man just said, “We’ll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man’s only son, breaking both his legs.

His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”

The man just said, “We’ll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer’s son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

His neighbors said, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”

The man just said, “We’ll see.”

Cheers to non-reactive spacious awareness.

Cheers to freedom.

Cheers to flow.

Cheers to peace.

Go forth and be spacious.

Comparative Political Leadership: Gandhi vs. Contemporary Leaders

Posted on September 16, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

On 2 October 2019, it will be the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas K. Gandhi in Gujarat, India. I would like to reflect on the visionary leadership that Gandhi offered the world, briefly comparing it with some national leaders of today, and to invite you to emulate Gandhi’s leadership.

While Gandhi is best remembered for being the mastermind and leader of the decades-long nonviolent struggle to liberate colonial India from British occupation, his extraordinary political, economic, social, ecological, religious and moral leadership are virtually unknown, despite the enormous legacy he left subsequent generations who choose to learn from what he taught. This legacy is available online in the 98-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

While touching on Gandhi’s legacy in each of these regards, I would particularly like to highlight Gandhi’s staggering legacy in four of these fields by briefly comparing his approach to politics, economics, society and the environment with the approach of contemporary political leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Xi Jinping (China), Emmanuel Macron (France), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), Binjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Shinzo Abe (Japan), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Boris Johnson (UK) and Donald Trump (USA).

Before doing so, let me offer a little basic background on Gandhi so that the foundational framework he was using to guide his thinking and behaviour is clear.

Gandhi in Brief

In order to develop his understanding of the human individual and human society, as well as his approach to conflict, Gandhi engaged in ongoing research throughout his life. He read avidly and widely, as well as keenly observing the behaviour of those around him in many social contexts in three different countries (India, England and South Africa). Shaped also by the influence of his mother and his Hindu religion, this led to Gandhi’s unique understanding of the human individual and his approach to the world at large.

For a fuller elaboration of the points about Gandhi discussed below and the precise references, see relevant chapters and sections on Gandhi in The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Gandhi’s conception of the human individual and human nature

In order to understand Gandhi generally, it is imperative to comprehend his conceptions of the human individual and human nature simply because these are the foundation of his entire philosophy.

Gandhi attached enormous importance to individual responsibility. He also had a very positive view of human nature. Gandhi believed that humans could respond to ‘the call of the spirit’ and rise above selfishness and violence. Moreover, this was necessary in their quest for self-realization. Self-realization, as the Gandhian scholar Professor Arne Naess explains it, ‘involves realizing oneself as an autonomous, fully responsible person’.

In Gandhi’s view, this quest is an individual one that relies on nonviolence, self-reliance, and the search for truth. ‘To ﬁnd Truth completely is to realize oneself and one’s destiny.’ But what should guide this search? According to Gandhi, it can only be the individual conscience: The ‘inner voice’ must always be ‘the ﬁnal arbiter when there is a conﬂict of duty’. And in his view, ‘the voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or “the still small Voice” mean one and the same thing.’

This point is centrally important, because the usual descriptions of Gandhian nonviolence stress its morality, humility and sacriﬁce while neglecting the fundamental norm ‘that you should follow your inner voice whatever the consequences’ and ‘even at the risk of being misunderstood’.

The point, of course, is that creation of the nonviolent society which Gandhi envisioned required the reconstruction of the personal, social, economic and political life of each individual. ‘We shall get nothing by asking; we shall have to take what we want, and we need the requisite strength for the effort.’ Consequently, the individual required increased power-from-within through the development of personal identity, self-reliance and fearlessness.

So what is fearlessness? For Gandhi, it means freedom from all external fear, including the fear of dispossession, ridicule, disease, bodily injury and death. In his view, progress toward the goal of fearlessness requires ‘determined and constant endeavour’. But why is fearlessness so important? Because a person who is fearless is unbowed by the punitive power of others and that makes them powerful agents of change.

Gandhi’s approach to society and political economy

Gandhi’s conception of society is based on a rejection of both capitalism and socialism.

In relation to capitalism, he rejected the competitive market and private property, with their emphasis on individual competitiveness and material progress and their consequent greed and exploitation of the weak. He also rejected the major institutions of capitalism, including its parliamentary system of democracy (which denied sovereignty to the people), its judicial system (which exacerbated conﬂict and perpetuated elite power), and its educational system (which divorced education from life and work).

In relation to socialism, he rejected its conception of conﬂict in terms of class war, its claim that state ownership and centralization are conducive to the common welfare, its emphasis on material progress, and its reliance on violent means.

The Gandhian vision of future society is based on a decentralized network of self-reliant and self-governing communities using property held in trust, with a weak central apparatus to perform residual functions. His vision stresses the importance of individuals being able to satisfy their personal needs through their own efforts – including ‘bread labor’ – in cooperation with others and in harmony with nature.

For Gandhi, this horizontal framework is necessary in order to liberate the exploiter and exploited alike from the shackles of exploitative structures. This is vitally important because, in his view, ‘exploitation is the essence of violence.’ Self-reliance and interdependence must be built into the structure in order to enhance the capacity for self-regeneration and self defense and to eliminate the potential for structural violence inherent in any dependency relationship.

This social vision was clearly evident in Gandhi’s ‘constructive program’, which was intended to restructure the moral, political, social and economic life of those participating in it. The constructive program was designed to satisfy the needs of each individual member of society and was centrally concerned with the needs for self-esteem, security, and justice. The program entailed many elements, some of which are outlined below in order to illustrate this point.

A crucial feature of the constructive program was the campaign for communal unity. This was intended to encourage reciprocal recognition of the identity of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and those of other religions. According to Gandhi, all people should have the same regard for other faiths as they have for their own.

The campaign to liberate women was intended to secure self esteem, security, and justice for those most systematically oppressed by India’s patriarchal society. ‘Woman has been suppressed under custom and law for which man was responsible… In a plan of life based on nonviolence, woman has as much right to shape her own destiny as man.’

The campaign for the removal of untouchability was meant to restore self-esteem, dignity, and justice to the Harijans (Gandhi’s term for those without caste) in Hindu society. Similarly, the constructive program was concerned with recognizing the needs of indigenous peoples and lepers throughout India. ‘Our country is so vast… one realizes how difﬁcult it is to make good our claim to be one nation, unless every unit has a living consciousness of being one with every other.’

The khadi (handspun/handwoven cloth) and village industries programs were intended to make the villages largely self-reliant and Indians proud of their identity after centuries of oppression and exploitation under British imperial rule. Khadi, Gandhi argued, ‘is the symbol of unity of Indian humanity, of its economic freedom and equality.’ The struggle for economic equality was aimed at securing distributive justice for all. It meant ‘leveling down’ the rich, who owned the bulk of the nation’s wealth, while raising the living standards of ‘the semi-starved’ peasant millions.

Thus, Gandhi stressed the centrality of the individual and the importance of creating a society that satisﬁed individual human needs. ‘The individual is the one supreme consideration’; individuals are superior to the system they propound. In fact: ‘If the individual ceases to count, what is left of society?… No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.’

According to Gandhi then, the foundation of this nonviolent society can only be the nonviolent individual: No one need wait for anyone else before adopting the nonviolent way of life. Hesitating to act because the whole vision might not be achieved, or because others do not yet share it, is an attitude that only hinders progress.

So how is this nonviolent society to come into being? For Gandhi, the aim is not to destroy the old society now with the hope of building the new one later. In his view, it requires a complete and ongoing restructuring of the existing social order using nonviolent means. And while it might not be possible to achieve it, ‘we must bear it in mind and work unceasingly to near it’.

The political means for achieving this societal outcome entailed three essential elements: personal nonviolence as a way of life, constructive work to create new sets of political, social, economic and ecological relationships, and nonviolent resistance to direct and structural violence.

Gandhi the nonviolent conflict strategist

So what did nonviolence mean to Gandhi?

According to Gandhi: ‘Ahimsa [nonviolence] means not to hurt any living creature by thought, word or deed.’ The individual, humanity, and other life forms are one: ‘I believe in the essential unity of [humanity] and for that matter of all that lives.’

Given Gandhi’s understanding that conflict is built into structures and not into people, and that violence could not resolve conflict (although it could destroy the people in conflict and/or the issues at stake) his religious/moral belief in the sanctity of all life compelled him to seek a way to address conflict without the use of violence. Moreover, despite his original training as a lawyer in England and his subsequent practice as a lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi soon rejected the law as a means of dealing with conflict too, preferring to mediate between conflicting parties in search of a mutually acceptable outcome.

According to Gandhi, British imperialism and the Indian caste system were both examples of structures that were perpetuated, in large part, as a result of people performing particular roles within them. The essence of Gandhi’s approach was to identify approaches to conﬂict that preserved the people while systematically demolishing the evil structure. Moreover, because he saw conﬂict as a perennial condition, his discussions about future society are particularly concerned with how to manage conﬂict and how to create new social arrangements free of structural violence.

More importantly, according to Gandhi conflict is both positive and desirable. It is an important means to greater human unity. Professor Johan Galtung explains this point: ‘far from separating two parties, a conﬂict should unite them, precisely because they have their incompatibility in common.’ More fundamentally, Gandhi believed that conﬂict should remind antagonists of the deeper, perhaps transcendental, unity of life, because in his view humans are related by a bond that is deeper and more profound than the bonds of social relationship.

So how is conﬂict to be resolved? In essence, the Gandhian approach to conﬂict recognizes the importance of resolving all three corners of what Galtung calls the ‘conﬂict triangle’: the attitude, the behavior, and the goal incompatibility itself. The Gandhian method of conﬂict resolution is called ‘satyagraha’, which means ‘a relentless search for truth and a determination to reach truth’, it is somewhat simplistically but more widely known (and practiced) in English as ‘nonviolent action’ (or equivalent names). While the perpetrator of violence assumes knowledge of the truth and makes a life-or-death judgment on that basis, satyagraha, according to Gandhi, excludes the use of violence precisely because no one is capable of knowing the absolute truth. Satyagraha, then, was Gandhi’s attempt to evolve a theory of politics and conﬂict resolution that could accommodate his moral system.

It is for this reason then that ‘Satyagraha is not a set of techniques’. This is because the actions cannot be detached from the norms of nonviolence that govern attitudes and behavior. Therefore, an action or campaign that avoids the use of physical violence but that ignores the attitudinal and behavioral norms characteristic of satyagraha cannot be classiﬁed as Gandhian nonviolence. Moreover, the lack of success of many actions and campaigns is often directly attributable to a failure to apply these fundamental norms to their practice of ‘nonviolent action’ (by whatever name it is given locally). To reiterate: ‘Satyagraha is not a set of techniques’.

But Gandhi was not just committed to nonviolence; he was committed to strategy as well. Because he was a shrewd political analyst and not naive enough to believe that such qualities as truth, conviction and courage, nor factors such as numbers mobilized, would yield the necessary outcomes in conflict, he knew that strategy, too, was imperative.

Consequently, for example, he set out to develop a framework for applying nonviolence in such a way that desirable outcomes were built into the means of struggle. ‘They say “Means are after all means”. I would say “means are after all everything”. As the means so the end.’

Gandhi the ecologist

According to Karl Marx, the crisis of civilization was created by the production relations of capitalism; for Gandhi, it was created by the process of industrialization itself. This process both stimulated and was fueled by the unrestrained growth of individual wants. The remedy, according to Gandhi, lay in individuals transforming themselves and, through this transformation, founding a just social order.

He argued that social transformation, no matter how profound, would be neither adequate nor lasting if individuals themselves were not transformed. A part of this strategy was ‘the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants’. Gandhi did not begrudge people a reasonable degree of physical well-being, but he made a clear distinction between needs and wants. ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every [person’s] need but not for every [person’s] greed.’

But, as with everything else in Gandhi’s worldview, he did not just advocate this simple material lifestyle; he lived it, making and wearing his own khadi, and progressively reducing his personal possessions.

Contemporary Political Leaders

While contemporary national leaders obviously display a wide variety of styles, it is immediately evident that individuals such as Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Xi Jinping (China), Emmanuel Macron (France), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), Binjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Shinzo Abe (Japan), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Boris Johnson (UK) and Donald Trump (USA) might be readily identified as representative of virtually all of them.

And whatever one might say about each of these leaders, it is clear from both their words and behaviour that none of them regards the human individual and their conscience as the foundation on which their national societies or even global society should be built. On the contrary, individuals are destroyed, one way or another, so that society is not inconvenienced more than minimally by any semblance of ‘individuality’ or individual conscience.

Moreover, while in some countries there are clearly articulated doctrines about reducing inequality and, in a few cases, some effort to achieve this, there is little or no concerted effort to restructure their national societies and economies so that inequality is eliminated; on the contrary, the wealth of the few is celebrated and defended by law. None of these leaders wears a local equivalent of khadi to express their solidarity with those less privileged and model a lifestyle that all can (sustainably) share.

The oppression of certain social groups, such as women, indigenous peoples, racial and religious minorities, particular castes or classes, those of particular sexual and identity orientations or with disabilities, remains widespread, if not endemic, in each of these societies with considerably less than full effort put into redressing these forms of discrimination.

Not one of these leaders could profess an ecological worldview (and national policies that reflected a deep commitment to environmental sustainability) or the simplicity of material lifestyle that Gandhi lived (and invited others to emulate).

And not one of them could pretend that killing fellow human beings was abhorrent to them with each of these countries and their leaders content to spend vast national resources on military violence rather than even explore the possibility of adopting the strategically superior (when properly understood and implemented) strategy of nonviolent defense that Gandhi advocated. ‘I have always advised and insisted on nonviolent defence. But I recognize that it has to be learnt like violent defence. It requires a different training.’ See The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach or, more simply, Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

For just a taste of the discriminatory, destructive and violent policies of contemporary political leaders, see ‘Equality Reserved: Saudi Arabia and the Convention to End All Discrimination against Women’, ‘156 Fourth World Nations suffered Genocide since 1945: The Indigenous Uyghurs Case’, ‘Weaponizing Space Is the New Bad Idea Coming From Washington D.C.’ and ‘Report Shows Corporations and Bolsonaro Teaming Up to Destroy the Amazon’. But for further evidence of the support of contemporary political leaders for violence and exploitation in all of their forms, just consult any progressive news outlet.

As an aside, it is important to acknowledge that the world has had or still does have some national leaders with at least some of Gandhi’s credentials. It also has many community leaders who display at least some of these credentials too, which is why there are so many social movements working to end violence, inequality, exploitation and ecological destruction in their many forms.

Was Gandhi realistic? Was he right?

But even if you concede that Gandhi was a visionary, you might still ask ‘Was Gandhi realistic?’ Surely it is asking too much for modern political leaders to live simply and nurture ecological sustainability, to work energetically against all forms of inequality and discrimination, and to deal with conflicts without violence, for example. Especially in a world where corporations are so powerful and drive so much of the inequality, violence and ecological destruction that takes place.

Of course, ‘Was Gandhi realistic?’ is the wrong question. With human beings now on the brink of precipitating our own extinction – see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – the more appropriate question is ‘Was Gandhi right?’

And if he was, then we should be attempting to emulate him, however imperfect our attempts may be. Moreover, we should be endeavouring to improve on his efforts because no-one could credibly suggest that Gandhi’s legacy has had the impact that India, or the world, needs.

Can we improve on Gandhi?

Of course we can. As Gandhi himself would want us to do: ‘If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors.’

One key area in which I would improve on Gandhi is an outcome of doing decades of research to understand the fundamental cause of violence in human society: the dysfunctional parenting and teaching models we are using which inflict virtually endless ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on children and adolescents. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

This cause must be addressed if we are to have any chance of eliminating the staggering and unending violence, in all of its forms, from our families, communities and societies while empowering all individuals to deal fearlessly and nonviolently with conflict.

Hence, I would encourage people to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will require them to learn the art of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

For those who need to heal emotionally themselves in order to be able to engage with children in this way, see ‘Putting Feelings First’.

There are several vitally important reasons why a radical reorientation of our parenting and teaching models is necessary as part of any strategy to end human violence. One reason is that the emotional damage inflicted on children leaves them unconsciously terrified and virtually powerless to deal with reality; that is, to respond powerfully to (rather than retreat into delusion about) political, military, economic, social and ecological circumstances. As casual observation confirms, most individuals in industrialized societies become little more than mindlessly obedient consumers under the existing parenting and teaching models. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. This is as far as it can get from Gandhi’s aspiration to generate individuals who are fearless.

Moreover, at their worst, these parenting and teaching models generate vast numbers of people who are literally insane: an accurate description of most of the political leaders mentioned earlier but particularly those who pull the strings of these leaders. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Another reason that a radical reorientation of our parenting and teaching models is necessary is so that we produce a far greater number of people of conscience who can think, plan and act strategically in response to our interrelated existential crises. Too few people have these capacities. See, for example, ‘Why Activists Fail’ and ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’. Consequently, most activism, and certainly that activism on issues vital to human survival, lacks the necessary strategic orientation, which is explained in Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

A fourth reason that transformed parenting and teaching approaches are necessary is that it will open up a corner of the ‘conflict square’ that Gandhi (and Galtung) do not discuss: the feelings, particularly fear, that shape all conflicts (that is, the other three corners of the ‘conflict square’: attitude, behaviour and goal incompatibility) and then hold them in place. Fear and other suppressed feelings are central to any conflict and these must be heard if conflict is to be resolved completely. But, more fundamentally, conflict is much less likely to emerge (and then become ‘frozen’) if fear and other feelings are not present at the beginning. Imagine how much easier it would be to deal with any situation or conflict if the various parties involved just weren’t scared (whether of the process and/or certain possible outcomes). See ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.

Anyway, separately from the above, if you share Gandhi’s understanding that the Earth cannot sustain the massive overconsumption that is now destroying our biosphere, consider participating in a project that he inspired: ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

And consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Despite the now overwhelming odds against human survival, can we get humanity back on track? Gandhi would still be optimistic: ‘A small body of determined spirits ﬁred by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.’

Are you one of those ‘determined spirits’?

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The Humans Are Waking Up

Posted on September 15, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.

The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.

Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.

Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.

Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.

I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

This is the clearest I've been able to sum it all up so far.https://t.co/JqbZMKn7ov

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 22, 2018

But so what, right? Just because an individual is capable of exiting the fearful egoic state of consciousness which propagandists and social engineers exploit to manipulate us into consenting to the status quo doesn’t mean that everybody is. People have been writing about spiritual enlightenment for millennia, and still we remain collectively asleep. Believing that such a shift is possible on a mass scale is childish and absurd. Right?

Well, maybe. That objection certainly makes sense from the perspective of our consensus worldview about what humans are capable of. Except people who’ve been coaching others into this shift for a long time say in no uncertain terms that it’s becoming more and more common.

“For the first time there is a large scale awakening on our planet,” spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said in an interview last year. “Why now? Because if there is no change in human consciousness now, we will destroy ourselves and perhaps the planet. The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now. Without considering the Eastern world, my estimate is that at this time about ten percent of people in North America are already awakening. That makes thirty million Americans alone, and in addition to those people in other North American countries, about ten percent of the population of Western European countries are also awakening. This is probably enough of a critical mass to bring about a new earth. So the transformation of consciousness is truly happening even though they won’t be reporting it on tonight’s news. Is it happening fast enough? I am hopeful about humanity’s future, much more so now than when I wrote The Power of Now. In fact that is why I wrote that book. I really wasn’t sure that humanity was going to survive. Now I feel differently. I see many reasons to be hopeful.”

Tolle is easily the best-known teacher on the subject of enlightenment in the western world, and he’s been doing it for decades. There’s not much research available on this topic, but if anyone in the west has interacted with enough people and gathered enough experience to make such a declaration, it would be him.

But what if he’s wrong? Well again, maybe. But he’s not alone in this perspective.

“There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today. More and more people are waking up—having real, authentic glimpses of reality,” writes Adyashanti, another longtime popular awakening coach. “In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It’s this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true— that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving. But as time has passed, more and more people are coming to me who have already had glimpses of this greater reality.”

Adyashanti gets a bit more specific than Tolle, saying that it’s non-abiding “glimpse”-type awakenings in particular that are growing more common, which often happen spontaneously without having been sought out.

“This glimpse of awakening, which I call non-abiding awakening, is becoming more and more common,” he writes. “It happens for a moment, an afternoon, a day, a week—maybe as long as a month or two. Awareness opens up, the sense of the separate self falls away—and then, like the aperture on a camera lens, awareness closes back down.”

Jac O’Keeffe, another awakening coach who’s been teaching for some time, has more to add on the subject. She said in a 2015 interview that the awakening process, which used to be a difficult and much more physiologically gruelling ordeal for humans, is coming to us more easily not just as a process, but in terms of how physically taxing it is as well.

“We live in an interesting time, and whether it’s a leap in the evolution of consciousness, or whether it’s because of the industrial age and the quickening that has come about in how we function as human beings; whether it’s unusual, or whether it’s a part of the pattern, I’m not sure,” O’Keeffe said. “However, what’s happening right now is that there’s a mutation happening because we’re not changing fast enough for the changing mechanisms that we have created in the world. And so the shift in consciousness that’s happening now, it’s phenomenally more rapid than how it used to be. Things are not as concrete and as solid, not as difficult to shift in folk’s perception as it used to be. That’s for sure, for sure.”

“The mechanism of which through this is seen also, there seems to be less of a trauma or a dramatic shift,” O’Keeffe added. “Spiritual shifts used to be really difficult on the body, really difficult on every level — they’re not now. And what is that? How come? It’s like our whole cellular structures are more susceptible to transformation, to the embodiment of a higher frequency, a higher vibration. And you know, while we have more toxicity, we also have more availability of hearing what’s beyond all of it, of information, of new influences, of education, you know? We’re learning how to use the mind at last. And so this is bringing about a quickening in the evolution of consciousness.”

Dr Jeffery A Martin, who has been gathering data on awakened individuals for the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, told me via email that “We see an uptick in our data that starts about 1996. By this I mean the number of people saying they transitioned after that time versus before.”

“However it is important to note that we have a snowball sample, not a full population sample, so that could be a bias in our data,” Martin added. “If it is not, the only correlate we’ve been able to think of is that the Internet was reaching a level of connectivity and information sharing maturity starting about this time. So practices that were formerly secret or soloed were starting to become more available, and one of our key findings is that the best way to make progress is to find your fit from a practice standpoint.”

“I’m reasonably confident that significantly more people are coming to see True Nature than any other time in human history,” said awakening coach Fred Davis when I asked him for comment on the subject via email, adding, “I do think there are more clear beings on the planet than there were even ten years ago.”

Now obviously awakenings becoming more common than they used to be wouldn’t by itself mean much; humanity overall remains deeply unconscious and we appear to be bound for either extinction or Orwellian dystopia if we continue on our current trajectory at its current rate. But the fact that this phenomenon seems to be getting more common and more easy in various ways indicates that something is up. Something entirely unanticipated, from way out of left field which neither the revolutionaries nor the propagandists have foreseen.

But why would we be experiencing a sudden shift in consciousness? Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain it, since if this phenomenon is real it’s moving far too quickly and without natural selection eliminating the unenlightened from the gene pool at any noticeable rate.

Well, maybe as O’Keeffe suggested it’s got something to do with the industrial age and how it’s changed the way we function as a species, or as Martin theorized is due to the increased availability of spiritual teachings online. We now after all have over 4.5 billion human brains connected to each other by the internet with well over half our world’s population now online, which by itself is per definition a shift in human consciousness without adding any fancy stuff about spiritual enlightenment. It’s hard to imagine such a drastic change not having a significant impact on the way our minds operate collectively. So that could be part of it.

It could also have something to do with the fact that, as Adyashanti once suggested in an interview, we’re all aware on some level that we’re at a point of crisis where we’ll either change or go extinct.

“Crises are often the catalyst for change,” he said. “And I think as humanity is in general we can all start to agree, I hope we’re starting to agree, that we’re coming to a place of crisis. That… we’re coming into contact, not just with our own personal mortality, but our mortality as a species. That we as a species may not survive. And that can provide, just like individual mortality, [that] can lead to a change of consciousness because we realize time’s run out. There is no more time. So in that ‘no more time’ sometimes consciousness can shift. And as humanity I think we’re rapidly approaching that same kind of imperative. Time is running out and so quite naturally there is tremendous pressure on humanity and on humanity’s consciousness right now. We all feel it, right? This tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everyone knows that if there’s not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness then this opportunity will be missed.”

Another potential explanation for our apparent “quickening” is the possibility that we’re all a lot more interconnected than we assume we are. Some strange and unexpected anomalies in scientific studies have poked a few uncomfortable holes in the consensus worldview about organisms existing as wholly independent individuals on this earth, which opens up the possibility that one person’s awakening could in some ways inform the level of consciousness of the whole of humanity.

Scientist Rupert Sheldrake has been documenting the curious way animals sometimes appear capable of picking up new skills in ways that learning and genetics don’t seem to account for, like the strange case of laboratory rats around the world suddenly getting better at navigating water mazes from generation to generation following a water maze study in the 1920s by psychologist William McDougall. Sheldrake’s theories are often rejected by mainstream scientists with an extreme emotionality which reveals an egoic fixation on dogma rather than scientific objectivity, but if you’re curious about his ideas he had an interesting appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience a few years ago which outlines his thinking more clearly than any other video I’ve found.

If this is true, if humans are interconnected in such a way that one person’s awakening could be informing the rest of the species, then this could indicate that we are on track for a exponential awakening event of the kind that could transform us as a species overnight.

When futurist Roy Amara said “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” he wasn’t really making a statement about technology, he was making a statement about human cognition. We’re pattern-seeking creatures whose minds tend to think in linear terms within the near future, a tendency which served us well in our evolutionary history when trying to predict when it’s safe to reproduce and where the mammoths will be, but which is absolutely useless in predicting large-scale movements which may be nonlinear. It’s possible that the only reason the predictions the hippies were making about the “great awakening” that started in the sixties was solely because of this cognitive bias Amara spoke of. Perhaps we overestimated the short-term effects of that shift and underestimated its ongoing effects in the long term.

I personally don’t know quite what to make of any of this, which could end up being a good thing. If our future depends on us finding a way out of this ecocidal, omnicidal status quo that the propagandists and manipulators can’t anticipate and slam the door on, it’s going to have to come from an unexpected and mysterious direction. Something does appear to be stirring deep within our species, and for me that’s enough reason to hold out hope and keep pushing for real change. Maybe this shift isn’t what it appears to be from my point of view, and even if it is that doesn’t mean it will necessarily start happening quickly enough, but it’s enough to take a stand on. I believe we’ll either transcend our old self-destructive patterns or perish, so we might as well say “Damn the torpedoes” and sprint toward that transcendence at full speed.

The Varieties of Psychonautic Experience: Erik Davis’s ‘High Weirdness’

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Art by Arik Roper

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis
Strange Attractor Press/MIT Press, 2019

Two months ago, I devoured Erik Davis’s magisterial 2019 book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies the same weekend I got it, despite its 400-plus pages of sometimes dense, specialist prose. And for the past two months I have tried, in fits and starts, to gather together my thoughts on it—failing every single time. Sometimes it’s been for having far too much to say about the astonishing level of detail and philosophical depth contained within. Sometimes it’s been because the book’s presentation of the visionary mysticism of three Americans in the 1970s—ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna, parapolitical trickster Robert Anton Wilson, and paranoid storyteller-mystic Philip K. Dick—has hit far too close to home for me personally, living in the late 2010s in a similarly agitated political (and mystical) state. In short, High Weirdness has seemed to me, sitting on my bookshelf, desk, or in my backpack, like some cursed magical grimoire out of Weird fiction—a Necronomicon or The King in Yellow, perhaps—and I became obsessed with its spiraling exploration of the unfathomable universe above and the depthless soul below. It has proven itself incapable of summary in any linear, rationalist way.

So let’s dispense with rationalism for the time being. In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of McKenna, Wilson, and Dick: explorations that were an attempt to construct meaning out of a world that to these three men, in the aftermath of the cultural revelations and revolutions of the 1960s that challenged the supposed wisdom and goodness of American hegemony, suddenly offered nothing but nihilism, paranoia, and despair. These three men were all, in their own unique ways, magicians, shamans, and spiritualists who used the tools at their disposal—esoteric traditions from both East and West; the common detritus of 20th century Weird pop culture; technocratic research into the human mind, body, and soul; and, of course, psychedelic drugs—to forge some kind of new and desperately-needed mystical tradition in the midst of the dark triumph of the Western world’s rationalism.

A longtime aficionado of Weird America, Davis writes in the introduction to High Weirdness about his own early encounters with Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, the Church of the SubGenius, and other underground strains of the American esoteric in the aftermath of the ’60s and ’70s. As someone who came late in life to a postgraduate degree program (High Weirdness was Davis’s doctoral dissertation for Rice University’s Religion program, as part of a curriculum focus on Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism), I find it incredibly easy to identify with Davis’s desire to tug at the edges of his longtime association with and love for the Weird in a scholarly context. This book’s scholarly origins do not make High Weirdness unapproachable to the layperson, however. While Davis does delve deeply into philosophical and spiritual theorists and the context of American mysticism throughout the book, he provides succinct and germane summaries of this long history, translating the work of thinkers as diverse as early 20th century psychologist and student of religious and mystical experience William James to contemporary theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk and Mark Fisher. Davis’s introduction draws forth in great detail the long tradition of admitting the ineffable, the scientifically-inexplicable, into the creation of subjective, individual mystical experiences.

Primary among Davis’s foundational investigations, binding together all three men profiled in the book, is a full and thorough accounting of the question, “Why did these myriad mystical experiences all occur in the first half of the 1970s?” It’s a fairly common historical interpretation to look at the Nixon years in America as a hangover from the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, a retrenchment of Nixon’s “silent majority” of middle- and working-class whites vs. the perceived chaos of a militant student movement and identity-based politics among racial and sexual minorities. Davis admits that the general mystical seeking that went on in the early ’70s is a reaction to this revanchism. And while he quotes Robert Anton Wilson’s seeming affirmation of this idea—“The early 70s were the days when the survivors of the Sixties went a bit nuts”—his interest in the three individuals at the center of his study allows him to delve deeper, offering a more profound explanation of the politics and metaphysics of the era. In the immediate aftermath of the assassinations, the political and social chaos, and the election of Nixon in 1968, there was an increased tendency among the younger generation to seek alternatives to mass consumption culture, to engage in what leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse would term “the Great Refusal.” All three of the figures Davis focuses on in this book, at some level or another, decided to opt out of what their upbringings and conformist America had planned for them, to various levels of harm to their livelihoods and physical and mental health. This refusal was part of an awareness of what a suburban middle-class life had excised from human experience: a sense of meaning-making, of a more profound spirituality detached from the streams of traditional mainline American religious life.

To find something new, the three men at the center of High Weirdness were forced to become bricoleurs—cobbling together a “bootstrap witchery,” in Davis’s words—from real-world occult traditions (both Eastern and Western); from the world of Cold War technocratic experimentation with cybernetics, neuroscience, psychedelics, and out-and-out parapsychology; and from midcentury American pop culture, including science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and pulp fiction. Davis intriguingly cites Dick’s invention of the term “kipple” in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a key concept in understanding how this detritus can be patched together and brought new life. Given Dick’s overall prescience in predicting our 21st century world of social atomization and disrepair, this seems a conceptual echo worth internalizing a half-century later. If the late 1960s represented a mini-cataclysm that showed a glimpse of what a world without the “Black Iron Prison” might look like, those who graduated to the 1970s—the ones who “went a bit nuts”—needed to figure out how to survive by utilizing the bits and scraps left behind after the sweeping turbulence blew through. In many ways, McKenna, Wilson, and Dick are all post-apocalyptic scavengers.

All three men used drugs extensively, although not necessarily as anthropotechnics specifically designed to achieve enlightenment (Davis notes that Dick in particular had preexisting psychological conditions that, in conjunction with his prodigious use of amphetamines in the 1960s, were likely one explanation for his profound and sudden breaks with consensus reality in the ’70s). But we should also recognize (as Davis does) that McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were also, in many ways, enormously privileged. As well-educated scions of white America, born between the Great Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II, they had the luxury to experiment with spirituality, psychedelic drugs, and technology to various degrees while holding themselves consciously separate from the mainstream institutions that would eventually co-opt and recuperate many of these strains of spirituality and individual seeking into the larger Spectacle. As Davis cannily notes, “Perhaps no one can let themselves unravel into temporary madness like straight white men.” But these origins also help explain the expressly technocratic bent of many of their hopes (McKenna) and fears (Wilson and Dick). Like their close confederate in Weirdness, Thomas Pynchon (who spent his early adulthood working for defense contractor Boeing, an experience which allowed him a keener avenue to his literary critiques of 20th century America), all three men were adjacent to larger power structures that alternately thrilled and repelled them, and which also helped form their specific esoteric worldviews.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to summarize the seven central chapters of the book, which present in great detail Terence (and brother Dennis) McKenna’s mushroom-fueled experiences contacting a higher intelligence in La Chorrera, Colombia in 1971, Robert Anton Wilson’s LSD-and-sex-magick-induced contact with aliens from the star Sirius in 1973 and ’74 as detailed in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, and Philip K. Dick’s famous series of mystical transmissions and revelations in February and March of 1974, which influenced not only his fiction output for the final eight years of his life but also his colossal “Exegesis,” which sought to interpret these mystical revelations in a Christian and Gnostic context. Davis’s book is out there and I can only encourage you to buy a copy, read these chapters, and revel in their thrilling detail, exhilarating madness, and occasional absurdity. Time and time again, Davis, like a great composer of music, returns to his greater themes: the environment that created these men gave them the tools and technics to blaze a new trail out of the psychological morass of Cold War American culture. At the very least, I can present some individual anecdotes from each of the three men’s mystical experiences, as described by Davis, that should throw some illumination on how they explored their own psyches and the universe using drugs, preexisting religious/esoteric ritual, and the pop cultural clutter that had helped shape them.

Davis presents a chapter focusing on each man’s life leading up to his respective spiritual experiences, followed by a chapter (in the case of Philip K. Dick, two) on his mystical experience and his reactions to it. For Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis, their research into organic psychedelics such as the DMT-containing yagé (first popularized in the West in the Cold War period by William S. Burroughs), alternately known as oo-koo-hé or ayahuasca, led them to South America to find the source of these natural, indigenous entheogens. But at La Chorrera in Colombia they instead met the plentiful and formidable fungus Psilocybe cubensis. In their experiments with the mushroom, Terence and Dennis tuned into perceived resonances with long-dormant synchronicities within their family histories, their childhood love of science fiction, and with the larger universe. Eventually, Dennis, on a more than week-long trip on both mushrooms and ayahuasca, needed to be evacuated from the jungle, but not before he had acted as a “receiver” for cryptic hyper-verbal transmissions, the hallucinogens inside him a “vegetable television” tuned into an unseen frequency—a profound shamanic state that Terence encouraged. The language of technology, of cybernetics, of science is never far from the McKenna brothers’ paradigm of spirituality; the two boys who had spent their childhoods reading publications like Analog and Fate, who had spent their young adulthoods studying botany and science while deep in the works of Marshall McLuhan (arguably a fellow psychedelic mystic who, like the McKennas and Wilson, was steeped in a Catholic cultural tradition), used the language they knew to explain their outré experiences.

Wilson spent his 20s as an editor for Playboy magazine’s letters page and had thus been exposed to the screaming gamut of American political paranoia (while contributing to it in his own inimitable prankster style). He had used this parapolitical wilderness of mirrors, along with his interest in philosophical and magickal orientations such as libertarianism, Discordianism, and Crowleyian Thelema as fuel for both the Illuminatus! trilogy of books written with Robert Shea (published in 1975), and his more than year-long psychedelic-mystical experience in 1973 and 1974, during which he claimed to act as a receiver on an “interstellar ESP channel,” obtaining transmissions from the star Sirius. His experiences as detailed in Cosmic Trigger involve remaining in a prolonged shamanic state (what Wilson called the “Chapel Perilous,” a term redolent with the same sort of medievalism as the McKenna brothers’ belief that they would manifest the Philosopher’s Stone at La Chorrera), providing Wilson with a constant understanding of the universe’s playfully unnerving tendency towards coincidence and synchronicity. Needless to say, the experiences of one Dr. John C. Lilly, who was also around this precise time tuned into ostensible gnostic communications from a spiritual supercomputer, mesh effortlessly with Wilson’s (and Dick’s) experiences thematically; Wilson even used audiotapes of Lilly’s lectures on cognitive meta-programming to kick off his mystical trances. Ironically, it was UFO researcher and keen observer of California’s 1970s paranormal scene Jacques Vallée who helped to extract Wilson out of the Chapel Perilous—by retriggering his more mundane political paranoia, saying that UFOs and other similar phenomena were instruments of global control. In Davis’s memorable words, “Wilson did not escape the Chapel through psychiatric disenchantment but through an even weirder possibility.”

Philip K. Dick, who was a famous science fiction author at the dawn of the ’70s, had already been through his own drug-induced paranoias, political scrapes, and active Christian mystical seeking. Unlike McKenna and Wilson, Dick was a Protestant who had stayed in close contact with his spiritual side throughout adulthood. In his interpretation of his mystical 2-3-74 experience, Dick uses the language and epistemology of Gnostic mystical traditions two millennia old. Davis also notes that Dick used the plots of his own most overtly political and spiritual ’60s output to help him understand and interpret his transcendent experiences. Before he ever heard voices or received flashes of information from a pink laser beam or envisioned flashes of the Roman Empire overlapping with 1970s Orange County California, Dick’s 1960s novels, specifically The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Ubik (1969), had explored the very nature of reality and admitted the possibility of a Gnostic universe run by unknowable, cruel demiurges. Even in these hostile universes, however, there exists a messenger of hope and mercy who seeks to destroy the illusion of existence and bring relief. These existing pieces of cultural and religious “kipple,” along with the parasocial aspects of Christian belief that were abroad in California at the time, such as the Jesus People movement (the source of the Ichthys fish sign that triggered the 2-3-74 experience), gave Dick the equipment he needed to make sense of the communications he received and the consoling realization that he was not alone, that he was instead part of an underground spiritual movement that acted as a modern-day emanation of the early Christian church.

After learning about these three figures’ shockingly similar experiences with drug-induced contact with beyond, the inevitable question emerges: what were all these messages, these transmissions from beyond, trying to convey? One common aspect of all three experiences is how cryptic they are (and how difficult and time-consuming it was for each of these men to interpret just what the messages were saying). It’s also a little sobering to discover through Davis’s accounts how personal all three experiences were, whether it’s Terence and Dennis’s private fraternal language during the La Chorrera experiment, or mysterious phone calls placed back in time to their mother in childhood, or a lost silver key that Dennis was able to, stage-magician-like, conjure just as they were discussing it, or the message Philip K. Dick received to take his son Christopher to the doctor for an inguinal hernia that could have proven fatal. But alongside these personal epiphanies, there is also always an undeniable larger social and political context, especially as both Wilson and Dick saw their journeys in 1973 and 1974 as a way to confront and deal with the intense paranoia around Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon (in his chapter setting the scene of the ’70s, Davis calls Watergate “a mytho-poetic perversion of governance”). In every case, the message from beyond requires interpretation, meaning-making, and, in Davis’s terminology, “constructivism.” The reams of words spoken and written by all three men analyzing their respective mystical experiences are an essential part of the experience. And these personal revelations all are attempts by the three men to make sense of the chaos of both their personal lives and their existence in an oppressive 20th century technocratic society: to inject some sense of mystery into daily existence, even if it took the quasi-familiar and, yes, somewhat comforting form of transmissions from a mushroom television network or interstellar artificial intelligence.

Over the past nine months I’ve spent much of my own life completing (and recovering from the process of completing) a Master’s degree. My own academic work, focusing on nostalgia’s uses in binding together individuals and communities with their museums, tapped into my earliest memories of museum visits in the late 1970s, when free education was seemingly everywhere (and actually free), when it was democratic and diverse, when it was an essential component of a rapidly-disappearing belief in social cohesion. In a lot of ways, my work at We Are the Mutants over the past three years is the incantation of a spell meant to conjure something new and hopeful from the “kipple” of a childhood suffused in disposable pop culture, the paranormal and “bootstrap witchery,” and science-as-progress propaganda. At the same time, over the past three years the world has been at the constant, media-enabled beck and call of a figure ten times more Weird and apocalyptic and socially malignant than any of Philip K. Dick’s various Gnostic emanations of Richard Nixon.

Philip K. Dick believed he was living through a recapitulation of the Roman Empire, that time was meaningless when viewed from the perspective of an omniscient entity like VALIS. In the correspondences and synchronicities I have witnessed over the past few months—in the collapse of political order and the revelation of profound, endemic corruption behind the scenes of the ruling class—this sense of recurring history has sent me down a similar set of ecstatic and paranoid corridors as McKenna, Wilson, and Dick. The effort to find meaning in a world that once held some inherent structure in childhood but has become, in adulthood, a hollow facade—a metaphysical Potemkin village—is profoundly unmooring. But meaning is there, even if we need technics such as psychedelic drugs, cybernetics (Davis’s final chapter summarizing how the three men’s mystical explorations fed into the internet as we know it today is absolutely fascinating), and parapolitical activity to interpret it. On this, the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1969, commonly accepted as the moment the Sixties ended, with echoes of moon landings and Manson killings reverberating throughout the cultural theater, is it any wonder that the appeal of broken psychonauts trying to pick up the pieces of a shattered world would appeal to lost souls in 2019? High Weirdness as a mystical tome remains physically and psychically close to me now, and probably will for the remainder of my life; and if the topics detailed in this review intrigue you the way they do me, it will remain close to you as well.

Me, Me, Me – The Neurotic Satisfactions of the Selfie Generation

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

We humans are rather curious creatures, I’ll admit. So many sides to our nature, so many colours to our emotions, so many journeys of our imaginations. But the question must arise, do we learn any more about these traits by making ourselves the perpetual object of our own fascination?

One would certainly assume so based upon the cult of the ‘selfie’ which rages around the world at this particular juncture of human evolution. I am tempted to say ‘devolution’, but going backwards would at least stand the chance of putting us in touch with something tangible, earthy even – whereas to live life as a virtual reality experience with one’s own photographic image as the central point of attraction – fails to provoke my sense of admiration for the human race.

The cult of the selfie has gone so far that reports are now emerging that addicts often put themselves in positions of real danger in order to get the perfect shot. A number have already died as a result of the dare-devil approach to getting the perfect selfie.

If I was to take a relaxed and laid-back view of all this, I might say, “OK, sure, we all need to get our kicks in some form or other, just let it be – let people have fun with their cameras on poles; apart from the excesses we hear about it’s pretty harmless fun isn’t it?”

It would be simple enough to go along with such a prognosis were it not for the fact that the whole thing is surely telling us something more than just what the crazy craze of the moment is. It is telling us something quite profound about an advanced preoccupation with superficiality per se. A kind of ego flattering sport whose popularity has presently reached the point of pandemic.

Is this just a kick-back against a sense of loneliness and sense of insignificance in a world that appears indifferent to the fate of the individual? Is it a wish to be noticed in an age of hyper inflated promotion of the engineered stars of stage, screen, video, social media et al? A range of elevated self-importance that runs from TV chef to porn star to political poser?

Whatever the cause, its ubiquitous nature is undeniable and has added yet more techno baggage to the 21st century tourist’s arsenal of seemingly indispensable smart gizmos. If one isn’t squinting into the illuminated screen of a smart phone while walking through a beautiful landscape, one is posing against the same background smiling cheesily for a selfie. While a discourse with nature herself, the source of all our deepest and most practical needs, is shunned. Left out of the picture, except to the extent that she forms the backdrop to the vanity inflated self.

Here lies a clue to this infliction. Modern day living has contrived to be a virtual reality form of existence, one which has alienated human beings from their roots. The ability to find a deep appreciation for beauty, quiet and the actual power of landscape has been smothered by an electro-smog of self satisfying surface pursuits; the sum total of which have formed a veritable barrier against true instincts, perceptions and genuinely life satisfying experiences.

This is a dangerous state of affairs, because we need these qualities to be at the forefront of our daily lives in order to gain/regain a true sense of equilibrium and balance. To find in ourselves that which gives us the courage and vision we need to negotiate and ultimately to vanquish the miasma of deceptions, twisted truths and outright lies legion at this time.

Those who feel the necessity to surround themselves with stimulants for the nourishment of their superficial selves cannot resist slavery to the controlling powers that be. Cannot resist becoming pawns to the carefully planned sales promotions that make such people feel they ‘must have’ the latest, most advance, most essential addition to the range. It is an addiction which includes uncritical acceptance of the disinformation that forms the great majority of what appears on mainstream television, newspapers, glossy journals and all channels of communication that maintain a wall of conscious-blocking visual and printed fake news and views 24/7.

It’s only a small step from here to open armed acceptance of life in a ‘Smart City’. A life where electromagnetic microwaves come with the very air you breathe. No choice. A place where ‘being monitored’ and ‘monitoring’ form a framework around the chief activities of the day – and no doubt night. A place designed and built for technology addicts, one might surmise. But actually a sinister prison camp for the imposition of a cyborgian programme of control.

It’s a place where no trees will be present because they interrupt the 5G signals which are the controlling motor of everything that happens in this arid world of concrete, glass and microwave radiation. Woe betide you if you should lose your personal chip which gives access to everything you need including your own self autonomous self driving car and the ability to unlock the front door of your home. In a smart city, should you lose or destroy your chip, permission will have to be sought from Big Brother to get back into your house, turn on the lights and open the refrigerator.

The ‘internet of everything’ which is to be the techno-hub of the 5G Smart City, ensures citizens cannot act outside the authority of the centralised computer master control.

Orwellian fantasy? No, already existing reality in its first stages.

But all this will, I presume be a source of frisson to those who willingly accept a fate controlled by anyone other than themselves. Who find such a techno-psychotic existence a direct extension of their fascination with all that comes under the word ‘superficial’. And that brings us full circle back to the exponents of narcissistic selfies, who roam the world camera triggered extension pods so as to photograph themselves against exotic backgrounds and famous works of architecture as though they were just empty cut-outs for a theatre set. After all, for selfie exponents, the only thing of real importance is themselves.

It is a remarkable seductive trait that leads to the entrapment of the spirit and soul of man. The master stroke in all this is that it all appears to be oh so normal – and those who do not conform are regarded with incredulity and relegated to the old pastures rare breeds museum for special research into their strange individualistic traits.

The rare breeds, however, turn out to have strong genes and resistant immune systems. They never abandoned nature in favour of the arid virtual 5G powered smartscape. Instead they organised resistance and were supported by energies that were not recognised or understood by adherents of the smartscape.

They kept alive the torch of justice and truth and they grew in number in spite of the dystopian landscape around them. They retained the collective name ‘humanity’ and the warm feelings that underpin that name – the state we call ‘human’. And in the course of time, they came to nurture back to health the planet that nourished them and to rescue those drowning in the narcissistic electro- magnetic soup of their naive choosing. They heeded the cries of desperation of these prisoners – to find a way back out of their oh so ordinary self-imposed toxic prison. It was only the irredeemable selfie who never made it back to real life. The rest experienced the flowering of a self they never knew existed. An unselfish self.

How successfully this unselfish self had been kept at bay by the distractions and fakery of the now defunct soulless smartscapes of yesteryear. As has been noted many times over the millennia, the only real learning is learning by experience.

“Be The Change You Wish To See In The World” - Misattributed, Misused, And Obscenely Underappreciated

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Name a quote by Mahatma Gandhi.

Odds are the first thing that jumps into your mind is the famous, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It’s a good quote. It’s pithy enough to fit on a bumper sticker, and it resonates deeply with something inside us all which tells us that it points to something true and valuable.

But, like so many other pithy bumper sticker quotes we see floating around today, these words were never spoken by the person they’re attributed to. What Gandhi actually said was this:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

Oof. That’s a bit more confrontational than the popularized version, isn’t it? Change my own nature? I thought we were talking about something light and easy, like not wearing fur or buying fair trade coffee beans.

That’s how “Be the change you wish to see in the world” tends to get interpreted today. It’s a line that is so commonly regurgitated in our society that it’s now cliché and almost meaningless, something you see on cheap keychains at the mall and scan over without really reading, but assume you understand because you’ve seen it so many times before. If pressed to really think about it, most people will say it means something like make the changes in the world that you want to see. If you don’t like factory farming, become a vegan. If you don’t like poverty, volunteer at a soup kitchen.

But that isn’t what the quote says. It’s nothing like what the original one by Gandhi says. It’s not even what the stripped-down bumper sticker version says.

Even if you look at the popularized version of the quote, really look at it with fresh eyes that haven’t seen it thoughtlessly regurgitated by corporate liberals and plastered on K-Mart products, you come away with the same message as the original. It doesn’t say “Do the change you wish to see in the world.” It doesn’t say “Enact the change you wish to see in the world.” It says “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It isn’t referring to a mere change in behavior or lifestyle, it’s saying change who you are as a person. It’s saying change your own nature to change the world.

This is night-and-day different from the conventional interpretation. The conventional interpretation of the quote exists as a vapid platitude that people make fun of hippies and New Agers for over-using. A deep, visceral understanding of that same quote, however, conveys more wisdom than all religious texts in the world combined. It’s a call into a transformation that is more real than childbirth. More existentially confrontational than a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The first challenge of the quote is to get you thinking hard about what changes you do in fact want to see in the world. Most people never even get that far into it. Few have actually thought hard about what kind of world they’d like to see in a positive way that actually envisions what that world would look like. Most people only think in terms of the little partisan battles they’re seeing currently: universal healthcare, immigration policies, gun control, austerity policies, abortion, LGBTQ issues, police brutality, etc. Few people get as far as sitting down and deeply contemplating a positive vision for the kind of world they’d like to help create.

When I make an inventory of the changes I wish to see in the world, I know I want to see people consistently choosing health over the illusion of security.

I want them making choices with the highest interest of everyone concerned over their own self-interest, even if those choices make them feel exposed or vulnerable because they appear to go against their finances or tribal groupthink, or are outside their comfort zone.

I want people to be collaborative rather competitive.

I want people to start trusting that the steps will appear in front of them as we forge a path onto a new, undiscovered route rather than retreat to the well-trodden highways because they are familiar even though we already know they lead the wrong way.

I want to see people giving up their tribalism and embracing their humanism.

I want to see people loving themselves deeply enough to love others meaningfully and with clear eyes.

I want people to rise above the competing narratives and make their distinctions according to actions and reality rather than the stories of the manipulators or their own internal manipulations.

I want people to have the wisdom to acknowledge where they have power and privilege and use it courageously, and where they are powerless so they may force those in power to change our suicidal trajectory immediately.

I want people to tell the truth, even if at first it’s only to themselves.

I want people to choose life over death, every time, without hesitation, and I want them to always seek their solutions in life and healing and harmony and reject the solutions offered by death, destruction, manipulation, sabotage and chaos.

These are just my personal desires for the world. After laying those out, the next challenge posed by “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is far more serious, and, if undertaken, will remain front and center in your attention the rest of your life.

Looking at the changes I wish to see in the world, I endeavor to be someone who consistently chooses to press the “health” button even if it scares me, or others, or both.

I try to be someone who always chooses in the highest interest rather than manipulating it slightly so I get a bit more or I look a bit cooler.

I try to tell the truth even when my tribe is yelling at me to shut up, but I try to have the wisdom to only do that when it benefits everyone and not just to seek drama or attention.

I try to trapeze through life using my inner compass because I know for sure that my old paths never led anywhere good.

I try to not manipulate others, and I try to not manipulate myself in order to pretend to myself that I’m not manipulating others.

I try to love the parts of me that I see in others, especially those parts that make me cringe, but also I try to love myself enough to walk away from someone whose patterns are hurting me.

I try to make distinctions by what I see people doing rather than what I hear them saying, and I try to integrate my thoughts and my actions as much as possible.

I try to use my power and privilege for the highest interest of everyone, but I refuse to take responsibility for things outside of my control, and I pledge to hold those who do have that power to account.

I try always to tell the truth, even if it’s just to myself at times because in that instance I don’t have enough power and privilege to speak it without getting unjustly punished. But if it’s in the highest interest to take unjust punishment, then I choose that.

I choose life, every time, without hesitation, and I want to heal any blocks either in me or outside of me that is resistant to turning every atom of my being towards life and healing.

Of course I fail a lot, but I hope to continue to noticing when I fail and course-correcting as often as needed, because getting this right is much more important to me than feeling like I’m right. I want this more than I want the story of having this already. I want to change the world more than I want the story of changing the world.

Crucially, I want this more than I want “me”, more than I want the personality that I think of as “me”. Whole parts of my identity have had to die in order to change into something healthier and more agile, and there will be many more parts of me that have to die in the future, and I welcome that. I welcome that with a deep breath of trepidation because it’s not easy, and in the moment before letting go it feels like I really am dying, but I know that it has to happen, and the more I do it, the more positive reinforcement I get as my reluctance gets overridden with curiosity as to what will manifest in the space I’ve created. And I know that in any case it’s better than the alternative, which is a slow, actual death through stagnation.

Beyond the bumper sticker, I’m pretty sure ol’ Mahatma was on to something pretty huge. I’m pretty sure this is how we fix it. It calls to mind that other hackneyed chestnut, The Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” another saying that has eroded into superficiality but contains some deep wisdom if you take it on as your calling. If we all individually took sincere responsibility for the only thing we can actually change — ourselves — then the knock-on effects are unquantifiable.

And, inevitably, world-changing.

Do We All Need To Fight For Positive Change?

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

We are living in interesting times. There is a growing sense around the world that humanity is moving towards a crescendo, a climax in our collective journey. But is this to be a fiery apocalypse, as seems to be suggested in the Bible’s Book of Revelations, or is it a kind of ascension to a higher level of existence, with the promise of a golden age of peace and harmony?

Within the community of people that are awakening to deeper truths that have long been hidden from us, there appears to be a mixture of optimism and pessimism. Some people seem to feel that while they themselves have awakened, the majority of humanity has not, and hence the hope of achieving the kind of critical mass needed to implement real and lasting changes in the world is not coming to pass. Others are of the mindset, supported by some of the spiritual literature, that an energetic shift in humanity is set in stone, and all we need to do is be patient and wait for things to unfold in front of our eyes.

The Greater Context

For me, the vision of where we are headed is grounded in my understanding of why each of us is here in the first place. I ascribe to the notion that each of us comes to the planet by choice, in circumstances that we agree to, and with some kind of mission that will give us experiences to foster the evolution of our soul.

Seen from this context, there is no reason to panic in the face of signs that the planet has started to go through significant changes physically, energetically, and even spiritually. We have to understand that these are the very conditions we sought out. Having said that, we didn’t come here at this time in order to sit idly by as spectators, fiddling in the street as Rome burns, as it were.

Does that mean that if we have become aware that a powerful elite has been causing most of our problems, and continues to try to control and enslave humanity, that we all have to take up arms and fight against them, or at least those who are carrying out their orders? The short answer is no–though there is much more nuance to this than is apparent.

Conscious Activism

What I believe is that we each have a particular mission in this. However, each individual’s mission may be very different, based on their talents, personality, and desires. Those individuals who are willing to focus their mind away from distraction and pay close attention to their feelings and deeper thoughts will eventually come to know their mission. It will be the thought or vision that makes that person feel most alive. The common link is that each person’s mission will in some way serve the awakening of humanity to the reality that we are all one, and rather than fighting each other we must find a way to come together in order to take the next step in our evolution.

That evolution is not guaranteed–it is contingent on enough of us as individuals to be active in the process, which requires not only that we ‘show up’ in the world and do what we are moved to do, but that we also take the time to reflect and look inside. Conscious activism is founded on the balance between reflection and action, making sure we are on purpose, acting with integrity and ultimately being of service to the collective.

For some, this does indeed mean being out on the streets and standing up for what they believe in. For others it means engaging in some difficult conversations with friends and loved ones. For others it is primarily a journey inside. And for us here at CE it means using our platform to raise awareness and stoke the thoughts and actions that can help bring about true and lasting change in our world.

In our latest episode of the Collective Evolution Show that can be seen on CETV, Joe and I discuss the subtleties of conscious activism, and how it is very different from the types of violent protests that sometimes spring up around us. As conscious activists, we recognize that being on one side of a polarized battle only keeps things divided. We hearken back to Martin Luther King, whose vision did not include the racially oppressed defeating their oppressors, but rather a bringing together of all races of a society in unity and harmony.

In the midst of our highly polarized and divided society, what is needed is for people to engage in difficult conversations with open minds and open hearts, focusing first on what we can agree on and respecting views that may oppose our own rather than trying to drown them out. In the end, the majority of humanity has the common goal of living together in freedom, prosperity and harmony. If we can all come together then the few at the top who would like to keep humanity divided will no longer have power over us.

The Takeaway

If we accept the notion that the conditions on the planet at any given time are actually a projection of the sum total of human consciousness, then we don’t need to spend our sweat and blood trying to take down the edifices and structures of power and control. Rather, we need to reach out to the minds of our brothers and sisters and inspire them towards a shared vision of freedom, respect and harmony for all individuals on this planet.

On Authentic Spirituality

Posted on June 30, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Spirituality, as it is implemented in our world today, is almost entirely useless.

No, that’s not fair, I take that back. Spirituality as it is implemented in our world today has been very useful for giving people pleasant narratives to tell themselves about the nature of reality, for helping people to compartmentalize and dissociate away from their feelings and their psychological trauma, and for giving people a sense of belonging and the egoically pleasing feeling of having superior beliefs to other people.

Spirituality as it is implemented in our world today is great for escapism, in the same way that doing drugs, playing video games or binging on Netflix is great for escapism. I think it’s fair to say that more than 99 percent of what is generally practiced and recognized as spirituality today is nothing other than glorified escapism, whether you’re talking about organized religious spirituality, casual spiritual-but-not-religious spirituality, or even individuals who’ve made potentially authentic spiritual practices totally central in their lives.

Spirituality is great for escapism, but when it comes to what really matters, the way most people incorporate spirituality into their lives is utterly worthless.

What really matters is life itself: really showing up for it, really, deeply experiencing it in all its fullness, and, hopefully, transforming the world so that life can survive and thrive on this beautiful planet of ours. Spirituality as it is typically put into practice is useless for this. Spirituality as it is typically put into practice is inauthentic.

Within all of the innumerable manifestations of inauthentic spirituality, there is a very small kernel of truth. This kernel of truth points to authentic spirituality. Authentic spirituality is what we’re all ultimately seeking, underneath all the confusion and ancient religious texts and gospel songs and prostrations and “boy look how enlightened I am” egoic constructs and sage burning and crystals and New Age platitudes.

Escapism can take many forms, from sexual impulsivity, to substance abuse, to gambling, to online discussion forums, to religiosity, to getting really good at meditating so you don’t have to feel your feelings, to getting really good at self-inquiry so you can form an identity out of disembodied awareness instead of showing up and leaning into life. These are all essentially the same thing, and they are all movements away from authentic spirituality.

Authentic spirituality, the kind that is a worthwhile endeavor to invest one’s short time on this earth exploring, is the exact opposite of escapism. This type of spirituality is exceedingly rare, which is unfortunate, because it could very easily save our world.

Authentic spirituality takes no interest in providing you with comfortable stories to hold onto, like why we’re all here or what happens to us when we die. It takes no interest in How It Is narratives about the Ultimate Nature of Absolute Reality, in giving you some story about everything being God or everything being oneness or everything being emptiness or anything being anything at all. Authentic spirituality takes no interest in the escapism of comfortable narratives. Authentic spirituality is perfectly comfortable with not knowing and not pretending to know.

Authentic spirituality takes no interest in helping you to avoid uncomfortable feelings like rage, terror, confusion, hurt, shame, dissonance, or fear of death. It doesn’t give you any comforting narratives about how God will always be there for you or how everything happens for a reason, and it doesn’t encourage you to sedate and dissociate from your emotions using meditation, mantras or re-framing your experience into a new spiritual-sounding narrative. Authentic spirituality knows that feelings are for feeling. It doesn’t act those feelings out unconsciously; that would just be another form of escapism. It deeply experiences them, listens to what they’ve got to say, and explores them completely, all the way down.

Authentic spirituality takes no interest in carrying you to any kind of special level or attainment, whether that be Heaven, holiness, worthiness, or enlightenment. Authentic spirituality is solely concerned with what’s really going on, right here and right now, not in some lofty, egoically pleasing goal for the future.

Authentic spirituality is always leaning right into life, while inauthentic spirituality is always leaning back and away from it.

Authentic spirituality means coming all the way out into the light, even your most tender, hidden, carefully guarded bits. It means doing everything you can from moment to moment to become fully aware of your own inner processes, your own habits of cognition, perception and behavior which otherwise govern the way you experience the world without your being aware of them. It means being relentlessly honest with yourself about what’s really happening for you in your present experience, to the furthest extent possible in each moment.

Authentic spirituality is intensely curious about the true nature of your experience. It asks always, “What is this experience?”, “How am I fooling myself?”, “What’s real and what am I imagining?”, and “What the hell am I, anyway?” It peels away every belief you’ve ever formed about the nature of reality and your experience of it, right down to your very most basic assumptions about what you are, what all this is, and how it’s all happening, and questions it all with the burning and innocent curiosity of a child.

Authentic spirituality strips away the assumptions we’ve always made about life and works only with what you can immediately know for yourself, in your own experience, here and now. It moves toward a recognition that life is experienced as a continuous, mysterious explosion of sensory impressions, thoughts, memories and feelings appearing in your field of consciousness, and that this field of consciousness is experienced by an imperceptible experiencer. It then moves toward clearly seeing exactly how that’s all happening, and relinquishing old and inaccurate assumptions and habits that were built upon early misperceptions of that happening.

Authentic spirituality works always to bring your entire operating system into alignment with a clear understanding of how life is actually being experienced. Insights into the nature of consciousness and self are fine, but until your whole being is brought into alignment with those insights they are worthless. The only way to bring about this alignment is to consciously process through your conditioning, your old habits of cognition, perception and behavior which were formed during your lifetime while you were misperceiving fundamental aspects of reality.

When you are fully leaned into life and fully showing up for it, with no part of you hiding in the shadows of unconsciousness or working to keep any aspect of life from being experienced, you become capable of moving in the world in a very helpful, guided and efficient way. And it just so happens that that’s exactly what you want to do, because since you have embodied your decision to really be here, you want us all to keep being here. You want humanity to remain in this world, on this beautiful planet, in a collaborative relationship with itself and with its ecosystem, fully conscious and fully present.

And yes, it happens to be the case that when you become lucid on how your life is actually being experienced, life does become a lot more enjoyable, and you are bombarded with uncomfortable feelings a lot less. It turns out that most human suffering is caused by unconscious mental habits which steer us through life in a very blind and haphazard way, since habit is a useless tool for navigating through a world that is always moving and changing. In the end authentic spirituality ends up resolving all the unpleasantness that inauthentic spirituality was created to avoid via escapism, and does so far more effectively. But for authentic spirituality this was never the goal; it’s just a side-effect of being true to what’s real.

It all begins with the decision to cease hiding from yourself. So very much of people’s inner lives are hidden from them, because keeping things unconscious, unseen and undealt with is in the short term a lot more comfortable than exposing your tender, dissonant, shame-laden aspects to the light of consciousness. But it’s the only path toward fully experiencing life, and if you’re not choosing to do that, then why are you even here? Refusal to fully experience life is escapism, and escapism is just suicide for cowards.

Almost everyone practices escapism in some way, and all we’re ever doing is running away from what it is that we really want deep down. The whole world is running in the exact opposite direction of the way it truly wants to go. The best thing you can do to turn us away from our omnicidal, ecocidal trajectory is to turn yourself around, and take the first step in the right direction.

In the same way that the world as a whole is pointed towards death because we default to domination, addiction and playing out unconscious patterns, individually we find these patterns in us as well, in small, seemingly benign ways. Turn your individual compass towards health. Grit your teeth, scrape the gunk from your mental wounds, and investigate their cause. Every return to health is a win for humanity.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: spirituality

Spaciousness: How to Free Your Mind and Stop Living Reactively

David Chapman on Spacious Freedom

A Story: Flat Tire

Stop Creating “Good” and “Bad”

Stop Thinking and End Your Problems

Parting Words: Spacious Flow

Comparative Political Leadership: Gandhi vs. Contemporary Leaders

The Humans Are Waking Up

The Varieties of Psychonautic Experience: Erik Davis’s ‘High Weirdness’

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis
Strange Attractor Press/MIT Press, 2019

“Be The Change You Wish To See In The World” - Misattributed, Misused, And Obscenely Underappreciated