“For three hundred fifty years, people in the Western world have convinced themselves that they live in a bleak world of dead matter spinning in empty space, when the real universe all around them is aflame with magic and power and infinite life. We need to wake up from the trance of scientific materialism and embrace …the dancing powers that surround us at every moment.” — John Michael Greer
I type this from a tiny home in the Boquete hills, within the rolling jungles of Panama. I type and the rain continues to fall outside.
One of the defining beliefs about the human story is that of conflict. If you’re ever in doubt, watch any mainstream film, or read any fictional book. Humans thrive on the emotion, passion, anger, fear, and courage of conflict. Its seems written into our DNA.
We look out at the world and we see conflict. Nation against nation. People against people, struggling to horde dwindling resources amid a changing climate. Even in nature, we look and find conflict: survival of the fittest. Only the strong survive.
The silver lining is that through conflict, we find wisdom. Therefore, the conflict was worth it. Necessary even. Conflict is a means to an end.
But what if the truth was different? What if wisdom actually came from release?
In the 1999 film, American Beauty, Lester Burnham is transformed from mild-mannered suburbanite to pot smoking, burger flipping, super hero, finally in control of his own destiny once again.
He finds inspiration (and escape) in the teenage beauty of Angela Heyes. She becomes his muse and desired mistress. Lester challenges himself to win her over, and the conflict is set.
Throughout the film, he lusts after her, in dreams and reality. His attachment is clear.
Yet, it’s not until the end of the film, when he finally undresses her, and the moment he desired for so long is offered. She reveals it’s her first time: she’s a virgin. And suddenly, Lester realizes she is no longer his mysterious muse… she is a scared child.
His reaction isn’t anger, or disillusionment. In fact, it’s release.
He let’s go of his attachment to what she represents: his own inner fulfillment. He let’s go of his resentment towards his cheating wife, he let’s go of his attachment to things and the trappings of consumerism.
He let’s go of it all, and finds peace.
His last words before the film fades out, as the camera pans over the rooftops of suburbia:
“I guess I could be really pissed off about what happened to me…but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst…and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain.
And I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.”
Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the ways that it has shaped our society. (Plus, it has some great sketching)
The one part of the video that I find problematic is the view that hunter-gatherer life was only based on blood ties. It ignores the likely reality that humans viewed themselves as part of the great cosmology of life – hence were connected to more than other humans.
This gives further evidence that our current view of human nature, one laced with greed, conflict, and war, is in fact not our true nature.
On one hand, I can count the number of times I’ve cried as adult.
Does that seem odd? We are surrounded by a constant bombardment of misery, suffering, and pain, and yet I’ve only been moved to tears a handful of times.
I wonder – does it speak to my inability to feel emotion? Or the success of the unreality…the banality…of the violence around me?
In 2005, after completing a 10 day Vipassana retreat, I arrived home. After 10 days without external stimuli, without even speaking, I was suddenly thrust back into the world, and coincidentally, Hurricane Katrina.
I watched as stories poured in of the destruction; homes flooded, bodies buried, families torn apart. Yet it wasn’t until I saw a rescue worker interviewed on CNN telling the news anchor about an elderly woman left in her hospital bed as the waters rose. She couldn’t escape the facility herself, but had access to a phone. The rescue worker, visibly shaken, related how he kept in contact with her over the phone. “Someone is coming,” he told her. “We will save you.”
As the rescue worker broke down, the news anchor shifted uncomfortably. “No one came to save her…” said the worker, now in tears. “The water came and she was alone. No one came to save her…”
The anchor abruptly ended the interview – unable to give acknowledgment to the pain of tragedy. No…far better to move on to the next story. The next tragedy.
I wept in his place.
Today I cried again. Today, I realized another great tragedy, what Charles Eisenstein calls The Great Robbery:
The anger of the teenager is the indignation of the dispossessed. The Great Robbery is first and foremost the pillage of their childhood. Childhood is supposed to be a realm of exploration in which we discover our passions, our selves, our life purpose. What we get instead is enslavement to schedules and obligations.
Childhood is supposed to be a time of play. And what is play? Play is something far different from what we, in a degenerate age, call fun—the consumption of entertainment. Play is supposed to be nothing less than practice in creating the world. Its highest expression is “deep play”, the kind which unfolds over days and weeks.
In deep play, children create entire worlds of the imagination, in which toys are but props. In so doing, they prepare themselves for an adulthood empowered in the divine function of world-creation.
He continues:
An equally grave loss is the loss of our passion and purpose. Bereft of the chance to explore our inner world, we grow up not truly knowing what we love or what we want to make of our lives. In the absence of a passion, we easily accept the range of available substitutes. I might as well be an engineer. Maybe I’ll major in finance. That might be okay. I’ll get a good job at least. Ask someone thus dispossessed what they really love, what makes their heart sing, and they won’t even know.
If you accept that the purpose of life is indeed merely to get by, to survive, to get a secure job with benefits, get married, have kids, retire securely, grow old and die, then perhaps this result isn’t so tragic. But if the adolescent intuition is true, that we are indeed here on earth for a magnificent purpose, then the cutoff from our passion is a terrible crime.
What does your heart tell you?
I cried because my heart tells me this is the truth. I see it in the pervasive mechanisms all around me – friends without purpose, surrendering their spark for an insidious lie.
Here is the right message—and it applies equally to the suicidal teenager as well as to the commonly resentful. The message is that what you have always secretly suspected is true.
The world is not supposed to be like this. Your intuitions of something more beautiful are valid. You are meant for an amazing, divine purpose. You are brilliant, possessed of unique gifts just waiting to be discovered. And—very important—anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Worse than lying, they are stealing from you.
Much has been stolen already, but there is one thing no one can ever steal (though you might put it aside, temporarily) and that is your soul knowledge of the message I have just related. What’s more, it is possible to recover all that has been lost. It might take time, but no one is a helpless victim.
All we need is to reconnect with the power we already have.
It is the power, first and foremost, to say no. You have been exercising that power all along, in fact, but when you begin to see the source of the betrayal, when you begin to see through the lies that construct the lesser life and lesser world that most of us have grudgingly accepted, then that power is multiplied a thousandfold. You have the power to withdraw, not through the unconscious mechanisms of laziness, depression or suicide, but consciously, mindfully.
And then, in the empty space that you create for yourself, begin to play. Begin to do what you enjoy, without having to justify it to anyone. From this starting point you will discover meaning, passion, and life, and you will become indominable.
In my last post, I wrote about the problem with rampant consumption. Particularly, how all we appear to know is how to feed the “Machine.”
It’s tempting to describe the Machine as familiar objects of scorn: big corporations, white men, society, the Illuminati, etc… but when you do that, you’re easily laughed off by the mainstream.
It’s become the ultimate cliche… “evil corporations” hell bent on making as much money as possible, staffed by fat-cat rich folk, always eager to trod on the lower classes.
That’s too simplistic, people say. Society is much more complex than that.
And it’s true: there are many reasons we (humanity) find ourselves in this predicament. Rampant war, dwindling resources, and climate change.
But when you ask where terrorists come from, they’ll give you a simple answer. “They’re extremist radicals, hell-bent on ending the Western way of life. They hate our freedom!”
How is it that one simple answer is more acceptable then the other?
In the wake of the Moscow bombings, President Dmitry Medvedev urged “harsher measures” to crack down on terrorism.
And yet, the bombing itself appears at least partially motivated by the killing of innocent civilians by government forces a few weeks earlier.
Then, four garlic pickers died along with 18 suspected Islamic militants in a three-day shootout in the mountainous forests that straddle two other North Caucasus provinces, Ingushetia and Chechnya.
The Memorial rights group on Saturday said the four were villagers caught in the crossfire and then dragged away and executed while gathering the wild shoots to sell at local markets.
“That shooting was just lunacy,” said Alexander Cherkasov, a Memorial spokesman. “And that lunacy was used to justify terrorism.”
Seems like a complex issue, and yet… also very simple: violence always creates more violence.
But why do we continue to get this simple equation wrong again and again? Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist, identifies the problem lies with our understanding of peace.
“We think that peace means the absence of conflict; thus we try to gain peace by subduing our opponents and by bullying our environment to serve our desires, unaware that this process is ultimately self-destructive.”
I believe it’s also what Haruki Murakami meant when he said he’s “always on the side of the egg.”
No matter the side you identify with: the Right or the Left, the activists or the corporations, the fringe or the mainstream; it’s no longer about creating an enemy. Having an “other” different from you is a symptom of dualistic thinking that has created untold misery for millions.
I think I might have experienced a minor epiphany today. In something as trivial as stuffing a few more reusable shopping bags into a bag we use to hold them.
Today, the holding bag was full… in fact, it was overfull.
I had to stuff quite hard to fit all the reusable bags in. After some generous stuffing… I made them fit. But something inside tweaked me for a second.
This was supposed to be a “green” solution to the mountains of plastic bags wasted every day. These mesh bags were supposed to be the answer. Save the planet! Bring a reusable bag.
And yet, here I was (albeit more slowly) collecting another mountain of bags. It was on odd observation… so odd that I felt compelled to wander back to my computer and Tweet it:
I’m positive there’s some sort of irony when you realize you’re drowning in reusable grocery bags…
The irony is that simply changing your shopping bags doesn’t address the real issue of rampant consumption – which is essentially how our entire society is structured. We have to buy things to keep our society humming. If I stop buying things, it puts people out of jobs. The Machine stops running. And if the Machine stops running… what’s the alternative?
No one really knows.
The only thing most people are starting to realize is that the Machine is no longer working.
A few hours after my intimate moment with the shopping bags, I came across a link posted by a friend from the book “The Ascent of Humanity.” Intrigued, I read the introduction…and lo and behold, I came across this passage:
Words like “high-tech” and “modern” lose their cachet as a multiplicity of crises converge upon our planet. If we are fortunate, we might, for a time, prevent these crises from invading our personal lives.
Yet as the environment continues to deteriorate, as job security evaporates, as the international situation worsens, as new incurable diseases appear, as the pace of change accelerates, it seems impossible to rest at ease.
The world grows more competitive, more dangerous, less hospitable to easy living, and security comes with greater and greater effort. And even when temporary security is won, a latent anxiety lurks within the fortress walls, a mute unease in the background of modern life. It pervades technological society, and only intensifies as the pace of technology quickens.
We begin to grow hopeless as our solutions—new technologies, new laws, more education, trying harder—only seem to worsen our problems. For many activists, hopelessness gives way to despair as, despite their best efforts, catastrophe looms ever closer.
This book explains why trying harder can never work. Our “best efforts” are grounded in the same mode of being that is responsible for the crisis in the first place.
As Audre Lord put it, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Soon, though, this mode of being will come to an end, to be replaced by a profoundly different understanding of the self, and a profoundly different relationship between human and nature. This book is about the gathering revolution in human beingness.
In Universe terms…that’s what’s called a “Booyah Grandma.”
Our goals in the practice of non-attainment may be quite modest – to be present in each moment’s sensation, perception, feeling, thought. We stop looking for some other moment.
It is wonderful to explore and continue turning the question of “who am I?” or “what is this life?” so that we are simply open to what it means to be alive – to be in a body.
And if we really don’t know, which we don’t, then the searching, the wandering, the questioning, the never-arriving, is a wonderfully liberating way to live.
Last weekend, Sean and I scheduled a photo shoot with the talented Nordica Photography.
With the impending release of the One Week Job book and doc, we felt it necessary to get professional photos done for journalists and bloggers to write about our story. (The previous photos are almost 2 years out of date now).
In a mind-bending bit of post-modern filmmaking, I shot the photographers as they shot us:
Also, the past week I inadvertently managed to appear in a variety of other news stories: from my Survivor mention in TV Week, to my thoughts on high-tech stress in The Province.
And finally, myself (or more accurately, my beard) were featured in a hilarious post for SoSauce ‘Adventures of Bearded Travelers.”
Ian MacKenzie is a new media producer based in Vancouver, BC. He shoots video journalism and documentary films. He also blogs about pop culture, new media, philosophy, and religion.
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Ian MacKenzie is a new media producer based in Vancouver, BC. He shoots video journalism and 