“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.” ~ Khalil Gibran
Silence can be a tricky thing to handle. Imagine yourself stuck in a traffic jam in rush hour, the cacophony of horns doesn’t seem to bother you as you find yourself teleported on the top of a peaceful hill.
Have you stepped into the country side, for a couple of days and start to feel something is amiss? You realise that you were actually more comfortable in the midst of the maddening noise. Initially, you feel bored and in some time silence gets to you – it becomes deafening.
To fill this void of silence, you turn to external stimulation like the TV, phone, Internet, social media, etc, its not the external noise you miss, but perhaps its the inner chatter that has amplified and become more powerful when you are quiet or in a peaceful environment.
It’s not the silence you’re uncomfortable with, but the voices coming from within. The urge to be surrounded by this external noise is only an escape from the inner turbulence.
Over the years, I’ve met several people who are not at ease in a quiet close-to-nature setting for a very long time. Its the mind that doesn’t allow you to immerse yourself in the stillness, instead it floods you with waves of negative thoughts, judgments, fear, jealousy and so on. The external commotion of our environment combined with the inner chatter of the mind leaves little room for us to truly experience silence.
We seldom anchor ourselves in the present moment long enough to listen and appreciate what silence brings.
The Benefits of Silence
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.” ~ Hermann Hesse
Silence is the space that allows you to navigate within and open new doorways to places where your mind is frightened to enter. Silence is pure, much like the pureness of a child’s smile. If you immerse yourself fully, it gives you the power to silent the ego and refuel your mind. The beauty of silence is that it simply “is”.
When I was growing up, my mother used to keep following “vow of silence’ for a day, more as a religious practice. ‘Vow of Silence’ is a personal, voluntary oath to refrain from speaking.
But when you think of it such practices can be used as a time to introspect and understand ourselves better. Making friends with silence gives us the opportunity to make peace with that part of ourselves that feels separate, apart from the sacred presence within.
Silence is all around us, you just have to make an effort to tune into it. Fill your heart with the noise of silence, become aware of the pulsating energy flowing through your veins, let go of all that doesn’t serve you and you will find the spot where magic happens.
Silence is such a useful tool when you need to resolve issues, arguments, indifferences between people. After a heated argument it helps to remain silent; regain calm, composure and clarity in the mind.
How can you be friends with silence and make it a part of your daily life?
Making time for yourself is important and utilising that “off” time to connect with nature instead of encouraging your thinking mind to take control and drifting away with it. In the past four to five years, nature has played a crucial role in my life, from being an amazing teacher and a reliable doctor, I feel more attuned with the silence of nature.
Spending time regularly in nature, even if its for 30 mins a day, will clear your mind of negative thoughts and help you unburden and be aware of your insecurities and problems. Throw off those sandals and walk barefoot in a garden or on a beach. Watch the sunset.
Tune into the sounds of nature, chirping birds, flowing water, and immerse in all its beauty. Dance, meditate, do yoga or any form of exercise that interests you, cook, sing your favorite song, grow plants or vegetables (even if its in a small pot).
These activities brings your mind back home, as you find yourself being more aware and submerged in the moment – this is experiencing silence. Silence and stillness work in tandem, taking us deeper into the realm of our true self.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.”
Slow down, enjoy the silence. You will become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, and not let it mess up with your mind. It is empowering and reveling in its companionship will liberate your innermost fears!
“The pause – that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.” ~ Mark Twain
“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” ~ Madalene L’Engle
You see the darkest blackest flag of your own despair whipping in a cruel wind. Its shadow is fierce and snapping inside you, filling you like hot smoke.
All of your guilt, all of your pain, every worry and every stress, all of your grief is there contained. All of your memories of angst and love-loss blasts through this shadowy self-apocalypse.
A vision of your birth, the suffocating feeling of birth-pangs, wracks your body. A vision of your death does the same. Everything else is crushed between.
The full-frontal meaninglessness of your tiny existence slams into you with such ferocity that you have no choice but to give in to the storm. You weep. You bleed existential fear. It tears you apart and puts you back together again. But before it does, it draws you to the brink of the Existential Black Hole.
It forces your head over the edge of its event horizon, showing you the end to all adventures, the end to all journeys. Your breath catches and drags. Your soul warbles in its sheath. You know now why you have chosen to embrace your shadow.
You would rather embrace the pain that comes from knowledge than the bliss that comes from ignorance. When you rise to your feet with a full heart, you’re aware that you are the universe itself rising with a full heart. And suddenly you are not so small…
Have no doubt: shadow-work is light work. Here are five compelling reasons why.
1) A sacred transformation of your shadow transforms the shadows
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” ~ Spinoza
Despair can be a crippling thing, but it can also be motivational. Like Tyler Durden says in the movie Fight Club, “It’s only when we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” This is a liberating disposition that flips the tables on the concept of despair itself.
Likewise, a sacred transformation of your shadow has the power to transform the shadows themselves. It expands your perception, causing you to become more aware of what would otherwise become suppressed or dissociated. Life is a rollercoaster ride, filled with peaks and valleys.
We all too often express the peaks and repress the valleys. And why not? The highs are so wonderfully happy and the lows are so dreadfully melancholy.
But “if wisdom is defined by our ability to hold the tension between opposites,” as Loius G Herman claims, then does it not behoove us to hold the tension between peak and abyss, by becoming more aware of both, and by disclosing the abyss as much as we do the peaks?
Indeed, what you’ll discover in such disclosure will be nothing short of heroic, because facing your own shadow is the epitome of courage. Like Clarissa Pinkola Estés said, “As with any descent into the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one’s nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”
2) You become more compassionate toward the shadow in others
“By accepting the inevitability of our shadow, we recognize that we are also “what we are not.” This humbling recognition restrains us from the madness of trying to eliminate those we hate and fear in the world.” ~ Loius G Herman
When we attempt to balance self-interest with a holistic perspective, we discover, as Socrates did, that deep self-interest actually involves concern for the altruistic good of the whole.
The same applies to the shadow. When we attempt to balance our shadow with the shadow of others, we discover that embracing our shadow actually involves embracing the shadow of others. This creates compassion for the fallibility of the human condition.
When we can recognize that no human being is perfect, including us, we can further appreciate our imperfections as a species and perhaps even garner a sense of humor about our fallibilities. True empathy is the ability to recognize and learn from the shadow in others and the hope that others can recognize and learn from the shadow in us.
With enough humor and enough learning, we might even reach a point where your shadow becomes my ally, and vice versa, thereby eliminating the parochial preachy programming of good-and-evil and replacing it with an updated platform of healthy-and-unhealthy discussion.
3) It gives you the courage to accept what you can’t change and change what you can’t accept
“Selfishness is not living your life as you wish. It is asking others to live their life as you wish.” ~ Oscar Wilde
One of the most powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and reveal your shadow to the light. Shadow on deck shines like diamonds in dark times.
Think Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump railing at the gods during the thunderstorm at sea. Think Maximus in Gladiator tossing swords at the rich, saying, “Are you not entertained?!”
The darkness of the shadow intensifies the light of the soul. It sends up flashes of intensity that brings hope to the courage of the heart. It builds a nest of ashes for a phoenix to burst from. It triggers appropriate matters to catch fire. It gives us the courage to accept what we can’t change and change what we can’t accept.
It gives us the courage to be an interdependent (ecocentric) force of nature first; and an individual (egocentric) person second. To display the shadow of the soul in dark times like these, to be fierce and to show courage to others, is an act of immense bravery in an otherwise cowardly world.
Struggling souls catch light from other courageous souls who are fully lit by both the light and the dark, and who are willing to show it. Like Nietzsche said, “The great epochs in our lives are at the points when we gain the courage to rebaptize our badness into the best in us.”
4) It teaches you the power of a good sense of humor and how not to take yourself too seriously
“Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” ~ Mark Twain
The only way we evolve as a species is to learn from our mistakes. If we can move on with our own journey, with the knowledge of both the successes and the mistakes of our forefathers inside us, then we can discover new ways that make their ways obsolete. It’s a way of recycling the mastery.
Engaging the shadow is a powerful way of recycling the mastery, as it makes conscious the otherwise suppressed and dissociated mistakes of the collective unconscious. Like James Russell Lowell said, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.”
This applies to what we can learn from the mistakes of our forefathers as well as to our own mistakes/successes. If enough time passes by, even the “good” that came from our understanding of things can eventually become uncouth.
This is because the only absolute in the universe is change, the only permanence is impermanence. Truth is a chameleon best recognized by the shadow. So it behooves us to have an unquenchable sense of humor.
Let’s work hard, but let’s play harder. Sincere play is the only way that the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold. Like Nietzsche wrote, “The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.” Let your shadow out to play. The playground has become grossly overworked. If we ever needed to go on recess it’s now.
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
The moral is too good. The immoral is too bad. The amoral is just right. The Goody two-shoes fails to see past his own purity and righteousness –probably because he has not engaged with his shadow.
The villain fails to see past his own corruption and wickedness –probably because he has become a puppet to his shadow. The amoral agent sees through it all with a humor of the most high, empowered to pull his own strings in full-frontal engagement with both his shadow-side and his light-side: a walking, talking, laughing-out-loud, flexible yin-yang subsuming all dispositions under his banner of humor.
The amoral agent teaches us how to be fierce with our courage, how to be circumspect with our wisdom, and how to have fun with the sacred play of our inner-child.
The amoral agent realizes that one could just as easily replace “genius” with “shadow” in the following statement by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.”
Indeed, liberate yourself by bringing forth the shadow within you. Use it as a tool to awaken the too-moral Goody Two-shoes and the too-immoral villains of the world. Learn to balance your own light with your own shadow, and maybe you’ll earn the right to bring balance to the rest of us.
“Yes, but negative is an illusion. Negative and positive are both construction material. Negative is evolutionary catalyst.” ~ Dolores Cannon, A Message from the Subconscious. (The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth)
Once we have embraced the idea of continuing on and transcended the idea of the fixed self, we can begin to apprehend the cycles of karma in our lives and how they may be holding us back from our greater purpose.
Without experiencing a past life regression where the subconscious, soul or guardian energies communicate directly to us through our own mouths what we should be focusing on is not necessarily a bad thing; if we are connected to our inner voice or are able to invite these answers in, then they will inevitably find us.
Like the cycles of karma we are ‘unconsciously’ experiencing, we can chose to attract the solution to them, and probably secretly know this information already. Through the depths of Dolores Cannon (past life regression hypnotists’) research, certain patterns and similarities between sessions have emerged illustrating that it’s not always as straight forward as it seems.
And, while it may be fun to speculate what exotic times we may have lived or people of influence we may have been, all is irrelevant in the law of karma. It is perhaps better NOT to know, but instead recognize these patterns on an intuitive level than explore the past for the sake of it.
Here are some common things to consider that may be the ‘focus’ of this lifetime:
The Subconscious Goes Awry
“Fear creates Disease” ~ They Walked With Jesus.
Our subconscious is a literal translator, and it is through this blunt and un-nuanced language that a huge amount of problems in the body are created. Problems that are often the reason many people visit a hypnotist in the first place; smoking, the compulsion to eat, not being able to get pregnant; the body is a machine and reacts directly to what the subconscious and the ‘agreements’ it has.
Some examples are; compulsive eating due to starvation in a past life, pains in the gut from being devoured by an alligator from the torso (yes there have been such reports whether you believe it or not), unresolved grief in a past life that leads to the desire to constantly warm the lungs (in Chinese medicine the centre of metal where unexpressed grief is stored and may lead to illness)… the results may be surprising and require some backward thinking but the simplest of changes can resolve it through daily mantra, affirmation or prayer. Let your body be your guide.
The Social Beast
Fear of the crowd, empathy, co-dependence or introversion, though signs of our higher calling in this life, can also be signs of unhealed past wounds. A life spent in solitude, as a hermit or a ‘negative’ experience in a community; such as a strict routine as a nun or the experience of abuse in a cult could lead to an aversion to the other in this life.
We need others to thrive and cultivate our energy with in this life, but deep wounds may cause the orphan, rebel or victim archetype in us whether we experienced this in childhood or not.
Being rejected by our community or having a fear of the crowd may weave its way into our karma as we go through life meeting people who desire to destroy us subconsciously, though modern terms like destroying our reputations.
Not taking things personally and transcending the ego will shine a light to drown this out, therefore breaking the bonds of karma and resolving it once and for all.
Karmic Relationships
“The awakening is the purpose. The awakening of the fact that in essence we are light, we are love.” ~ Convoluted Universe, Book One.
There is no ‘One’, as Jung put it; we meet ourselves a thousand times on the path of a lifetime. Whatever form the other takes, those who play a huge role will either be connected to your soul and there to guide it… or there to ruffle its feathers.
The reason marriage, parenthood and the relationship we had with our own parents can test us so much is directly designed to enable us to recognize what we are trying to resolve in ourselves. That said, many people have reported they are living a resting life, where everything seems easy and relationships are peaceful.
In the last century this was more common, but as time speeds up and a new paradigm quickens, we are having to speed up too; resolving karmic relationships at a faster pace and diving headfirst into those karmic webs in order to un-knit them.
The Absence of Light
An explanation for extreme cases of darkness can be an unnerving subject, but karma can offer us some explanation as to why awful things happen to us. Suicide, murder, abuse and disaster; the intense suffering this human experience can create has the ability to inextricably link us to one another for lifetimes.
Though the general karmic rule can be applied; reflecting on what others are doing to you and knowing that you probably did it to them at some point, and the flippancy in which many of us approach such areas of darkness; for example seeing bad luck as a sign of bad karma, or other’s struggle as something they may deserve feeds in to our own fears of wrong-doing and the need to compare.
While others have chosen to approach those areas of darkness and others have not reflects not on their depth of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but on their soul’s decision to brave the darkest caves and overcome it.
It can be difficult to get our heads around why such atrocities occur, much less have compassion for those involved, but it all goes back to the idea that we are cells in the body of God collecting information. Everything is possible and has some purpose.
Nature vs Nurture
Choosing certain roads in your life path that you attribute to intuitive responses to your karma may not always appear as they seem. Many subjects have reported that their thirst for travel was an integral one, and the many lives they fled from when they were supposed to stay put and uphold the ‘contracts’ they had made with others before that life consequently had to be rewritten again and again.
Every decision has the power to set us rolling back into the same traps; it is our ability to reach the lofty attics of honesty from the basements of our impulses. Fight or flight can often derail our life’s path and have us chose comfort or adventure over hard toil and humility. Only we can know.
From the watery caves of suffering to the middle road of privilege and reflection, the higher calling is always the same; to cleanse past karma, put things to rights and leap to the heights of human achievement.
Whether you feel you are not achieving your full potential, have an unexplained illness or addiction, or are experiencing the same round of bullets in personal relationships, your experiences provide the key to resolving your karma.
As Buddha did when he fed himself to the family of tigers, we have it in ourselves to grasp the highest path and highest option in any given circumstance; whether through giving all our accumulated wealth to others, finding compassion for the greatest of cruelties inflicted on us or simply not procrastinating a moment longer.
“Man will become better when you show him what he’s like.” ~ Anton Chekhov
What is it like to be human? What does it mean to be a seemingly finite human being in an otherwise infinite reality? Let’s be honest with ourselves: we are fallible and confused. We are prone to make mistakes and usually wrong about the conclusions we make.
We are in all ways uncertain, and we’re even uncertain about our uncertainty. We make gross errors, and we do it quite often. Because of this, we are hypocrites par excellence. But the question isn’t whether or not we are hypocrites, the question is: what are we going to do about our inherent hypocrisy.
Are we going to embrace it and discover healthier ways of being aware of it, or are we going to avoid it and continue our rampant suppression and dissociation? One answer is to use a basic scientific approach known as fallibilism, and then to further capitalize upon the precept by practicing it under a moral light.
Fallibilism is Latin for “liable to err.” It is the understanding that we can never know anything for sure and is implied within the sciences. The basic claim is that all human knowledge could, in the end, due to our fallibility as a species and our inherent hypocrisy, be completely and utterly mistaken.
In the most commonly used sense of the term, fallibilism implies an openness to new evidence that may refute a previously held opinion or belief while recognizing that any claim, scientific or otherwise, validated today may need to be revised or even withdrawn in light of new evidence, new disputes, and new encounters in the future.
It is the logical conclusion of the secret of open-mindedness. It embraces human fallibility and is therefore a benchmark toward understanding the human condition in relation to an ever-changing reality.
It stands to reason that any and all so-called answers will be discovered within the reality that we find ourselves questioning. Governing this precept, it further stands to reason that we can use this reality as a benchmark for whether or not our “answers” should be accepted. That is, whether or not it should be accepted as right or wrong. Keep in mind, we will still misinterpret the information, but at least we’ll be looking in the right spot.
At least the horse of our reasoning will be in front of the cart of our questioning. Reality holds the “answers,” whether or not we can ever grasp them. Trying to achieve answers should be like trying to achieve enlightenment, both may be unachievable, but the journey is the thing in both cases.
When we turn the focus of our learning upon the natural interconnected order of things, instead of on disconnected human opinion, we discover that the answers we come up with will be closer to being “right.”
Like Aldo Leopold said, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Or Louis Agassiz: “Go to nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for yourself.”
The first thing we need to do is base the concept of right/wrong in the realm of objective truth, instead of in the realm of subjective opinion. We do that by allowing the concept of “right” to mean “healthy” and the concept of “wrong” to mean “unhealthy,” thereby grounding the concept of right and wrong within the dictated, natural truth of cosmic law.
We do this so that healthy/unhealthy can be as close to “objectively determined” as possible. Otherwise the concept of right/wrong is weighed down by the subjective opinion of good/evil.
By shedding the subjective concepts of good/evil from the determining concepts of right/wrong we allow for the objective concepts of healthy/unhealthy to emerge as a guide toward a “somewhat” objective moral principle. I say “somewhat” because there can never be a completely objective moral philosophy.
Morality is a briar patch. So is philosophy, for that matter. And they always will be. We just have to get better at not getting unnecessarily pricked by avoidable thorns. And the best way to do that is living in healthy balance with nature.
Like Zeno said, “The goal of life is living in agreement with Nature.”
The difficult part is figuring out what is healthy and what is unhealthy, and then what to do about it. We do this by observing, listening to, and cooperating with nature and what it is dictating to us as being the healthier way to live in accordance with it. The simplest thing nature dictates to us is that we need air to survive. If we go just a few minutes without air, our system shuts down and we die.
The next simplest thing nature dictates to us is that we need water to survive. If we go more than three days without it, our system shuts down and we die. Simple. And if anybody is “of the opinion” that it’s healthy to go without air, or to go without water, then their opinion is most definitely wrong and invalid (Nietzsche’s Perspectivism). Such opinions simply do not matter and are completely irrelevant to healthy progress.
Nature dictates what is healthy and what is unhealthy. We only have to develop ears keen enough to hear it, eyes wide open enough to see it, and minds wise enough to interpret it correctly.
Like Dr. Daniel Wildcat said, “I believe that if I can sit out there long enough, those crows, the trees and the wind, can teach me something about how to be a better human being. I don’t call that romanticism, I call that Indigenous Realism.”
As it stands in today’s modern world, the nexus between human nature and the biotic community has been split. The symbiotic interaction between people and place has been hidden by the smoke and mirrors of the modern collective ego which projects a shiny veneer of hyperreality that blinds us to the fact that our roots are in the earth.
Derrick Jensen said it best, “Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”
Through the tears of our bamboozlement we may begin to see the unwavering thickness of the deception that has been laid upon us for the entirety of our lives, and we may even begin to peel back that thick-like-molasses deception to reveal the throbbing vulnerability of our naked ignorance which lies beneath.
The truth hurts, it cuts deep, but if we can intuit its lesson we can become healthier people, even within an otherwise unhealthy society.
Einstein pinpointed it when he said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
It’s time to remember the gift. It’s time to peel the layers of deception back. And the most effective tool at our disposal is the Occam-like razor of moral fallibilism.
We’ve hitherto been insulated by institutionalized ignorance. This institutionalization has crippled us into unreasonable, unhealthy animals who overthink the wrong things. Our relationship with the biotic community is practically non-existent. There ceases to be any organic intimacy between the human animal and the natural world.
We’ve forgotten that culture is a product of nature, and we seem intent upon turning nature into a product.
But as Aldo Leopold said: “The land is not a commodity that belongs to us; it’s a community to which we belong.”
We cannot see this because we’ve been homogenized by a system that is hell-bent on transforming the diversity of life into a bureaucracy. But bureaucracy is antithetical to life. Living systems cease to be healthy when they become bureaucratic. Thus are we unhealthy.
Like Derrick Jensen said, “It’s unavoidable: so long as we value money more highly than living beings and more highly than relationships, we will continue to see living beings as resources, and convert them to cash; objectifying, killing, extirpating. This is true whether we’re talking about fish, fur-bearing mammals, Indians, day-laborers, and so on. If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it’s gone.”
And here we are, exploiting resources until they’re gone. Ask yourself: How has this culture taught me to be a better human being? And then ask yourself this: how might nature be better at teaching me how to be a better human being?
Moral fallibilism is the method we can use to become better students to the awesome teacher that is Mother Nature.
A language older than words can only be understood and translated through the filter of moral fallibilism; otherwise we become overburdened by individual opinion and the expense of interdependent truth.
Otherwise truth becomes entangled in the unhealthy guts of an unhealthy culture.
Like Derrick Jensen said, “I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.”
There is something wrong. Our culture is fundamentally unhealthy and unsustainable. Moral fallibilism is an ethical method of cutting through the screw-tape of an unethical society.
There comes a point at which the universe dictates to us the nature of right & wrong: healthy & unhealthy. And there comes a point where we must choose to accept this dictation and become healthy, or continue to ignore it and remain unhealthy.
This point is at the center of every moment. It speaks a language older than words. It’s in the air we breathe. It’s in the trees that create that air. It’s in the water that moves us. It’s in the moon that moves the tides. It’s in the body, resonating within an ancient muscle memory.
Like Mary Oliver said, “You only have to let the soft animal part of your body love what it loves.”
You have to be in a state of no-mind to hear it. You have to be silent and tranquil to realize how loud it really is.
It can be as simple as the body telling us when we’ve consumed too little water (or too much), or as complex as the cosmos pinpointing for us what is the healthy way for an interdependent human being to live in an interconnected world (or what is an unhealthy way).
In many ways we can tap into the natural order of things through common sense alone, like the feeling we get in our gut when faced with a decision between truth and deception (red pill/blue pill), or how we intuitively know that rape and murder is wrong.
Don’t be afraid to use Nature as a guide. Don’t be afraid to use Pain as a guide. Both are superior teachers to almost everything else except maybe a good sense of humor.
At the end of the day, we are, as Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, “personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society we grew up in.”
Moral fallibilism is a superior tactic for achieving a more ethical society. Through the trial and error of human limitation through science and by relying more upon perfecting questions rather than answers, we will, like the Fibonacci sequence seeking to attain the perfection of Phi, get ever so closer to perfecting the fallible human condition in relation with the infallible cosmos.
We will get ever so closer to achieving a more mature and moral society.
Like Stefan Molyneux said, “It only looks impossible because a truly free and peaceful society has yet to be achieved. But once we get there, and we will, people will look back at governments as ridiculous, bloody, and evil hangovers from the primitive and drunken adolescence of our species.”
We can only hope, and through such hope remain circumspect with our implementation of the superior method of moral fallibilism.
“Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there will be no turning back.” ~ Ernest Becker
“Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience –self-transcendence, ecstasy, bliss, inner-light– constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with each other. A Deeper principle must be at work.” ~ Sam Harris
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, is a Latin phrase attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires, which literally translates to “Who will guard the guards themselves?” The answer: we will.
We must. If we are to have a humane world of loving tolerance and open-hearted compassion instead of blind ignorance and apathetic indifference, we must be the guards who guard the guards.
This requires questioning authority, which requires a leap of faith into non-faith, similar to thinking above mind with no-mind. Ironic, isn’t it? We need an out-of-faith experience, an above-faith experience, of healthy detachment in order to establish a platform for questioning authority.
The main culprit of our confusion seems to be our inability to separate religion from spirituality. What’s needed is a breach of our certainty, a tearing apart of the flag of our blind faith, an existential stretching of our all-too-parochial comfort zone, a way of untangling spiritual liberty from the tyranny of religion.
Cracking the cosmic egg is a shattering of our secure foundations, a smashing of our rigid dogmas. Allow me to take you on a creed-crushing, faith-twisting journey through the so-called forces of good and evil, wherein I will reveal to you how to get power of pseudo-power. Let the sacred breach commence.
Ego & Soul
“Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self.” ~ Alan Watts
Here you are: this tiny egg, a little bag of ego in an otherwise astonishing universe. But what you probably neglect to realize is that you are just as astonishing a universe yourself.
It’s not so much that you have a self that looks out on a world, as much as it is that you have a plethora of selves, each with a multitude of sub-selves, that each look out upon a world through a finite-bias laden perspective.
From this disadvantageous perspective you attempt to pigeonhole truth. You vainly attempt to put all your eggs into particular baskets, even though, deep-down inside, you know that there is no knowing other than not knowing. There is no certainty other than uncertainty.
There is no kernel-truth other than the truth of constant change. This is equal parts a crippling concept as well as a liberating one. It cripples the ego, but it liberates the soul.
The Ego wants the egg to stay intact, fearful of the unknown. The Soul wants to crack the egg wide open so that it can merge with everything else. It is courageous to discover new horizons.
“When you put all your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life.” ~ Ernest Becker.
Inside this astonishing universe you are surrounded by many other astonished onlookers, billions of other little bags of ego, each with their own menagerie of sub-selves, each with their own idea of who they are.
They too carry around baskets which they vainly attempt to put all their eggs into. They too are confused by their own pigeonholing of truth. And you begin to see how all of human history it has been the same thing over and over again; the same ego vanity, just with different egos; the same vain basket-filling, just with different baskets.
Some baskets get overfilled. Eggs get thrown at people’s heads even. Many bad rules, that aren’t based upon the rules of the cosmos, are created. Some are called laws, and they are bad laws. Many eggs get broken.
Much confusion is had, and you see that it has been happening throughout the history of the human leitmotif. You realize that some revelation is at hand, but still you cling to your ego, like you cling to your basket full of eggs, out of abject fear of the unknown.
But your Soul comes to you as your liberator, and the crack down the side of your precious egg is authentic and true, and it can no longer be ignored.
Good & Evil
“There is nothing either good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” ~ Shakespeare
Imagine becoming aware of the egg of your ego for the first time. The egg is a metaphor that represents everything you think you know. You become aware of it, and boom, it strikes you, there must be something more. But whatever it is, it’s unknown and possibly even unknowable.
It’s scary and adventurous all at once. That’s when the crack appears. That’s when your tiny Ego becomes liberated by your giant Soul. But that’s also when other people with their own egos and their own fears come in to take your liberated soul down a notch.
Their fear not only blinds them from testing the boundaries of their own precious egg, it compounds your fears about directly testing your own boundaries. So they sling words at you like “evil” and “sin” and “that religion is bad.”
And they placate you with words like “good” and “righteous” and “this religion is virtuous.” But these words are more like fences than words, more like walls than good advice. And before you know it, you’re going along with it.
You go through the motions of being a scared human being in a scary universe. Best to stay safe within the boundaries of the fence, you think to yourself. Best to remain secure behind the walls of human limitation, you reason.
And as you go through the motions of being a scared human being in a scary universe bombarded by scary laws that keep you scared and in line, you also go through the motions of having other scared people tell you what to do.
They call themselves “authority,” and although you can see through their façade and see that they are also merely scared human beings going through the motions of being scared in a scary universe, you go along with it. How can you not?
I mean, there are holy commandments, and thou-shalt-nots, and sin, sin, sin! There are devils, and demons, and Satans, and wrathful, vengeful gods. There are scared laws made by scared men that keep you perpetually fearful.
Your soul is petrified, a fossilized stone inside you. It must not be freed, because freeing it is somehow… evil? Huh? Like Blaise Pascale said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”
Or maybe instead of being afraid you decide to dig down deep and discover something more powerful than anything else, something that gives you courage beyond courage, something that de-petrifies your soul and un-fossilizes your heart, a deep, primal energy that has its roots in the primordial soup of cosmic love: a divine sense of humor.
Yes! This is your trump card. This is your Soul’s call to adventure. This is your most holy of holies, your divine liberation. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, you are a cosmic force to be reckoned with.
The crack in your cosmic egg is getting wider and wider. Suddenly you’re saying things like, “Jesus Christ can walk on water, but I can walk on Jesus,” or, “Ever mooned the devil under the pale dance lights?” or something crazy-witty like, “In the current zeitgeist the zealot’s zealous zenith zigzags to zero.”
And the laughter can be heard rumbling through the halls of the gods. And the fumbling, stumbling, scared shitless social milieu is staring up at you in wide-eyed fearful wonder. But you don’t give a rat’s ass, because you’re free, Goddammit!
And nothing can ever take that freedom away from you. Indeed, sometimes you have to wreck your life in order to truly live it.
Power & Pseudo-power
“Only now are you going your way to greatness. Peak and abyss, they are now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and lie beyond good and evil.” ~ Nietzsche
Just imagine yourself so completely free that even Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is just another stumbling ape going through the motions beneath you. Imagine tearing through hell decapitating demons, trumping devils, and murdering Satan on his pathetic throne.
Imagine blitzkrieging through heaven toppling ivory towers, liberating angels of their pompous halos, and stabbing God strait through his self-righteous too-white heart (see: If you ever meet the Buddha on the road, kill him).
Imagine shredding sacred texts and using them as kindling in your lighting of the third fire. Imagine taking all the fear and spiritual trepidation, all the religious anxiety and ingenuous placation, and wrapping it all up in a giant bag of cosmic tomfoolery with the label “the jokes on you” and declaring to the powers-that-be, religious or otherwise, “shove this up your fear-mongering ass!”
Then imagine subsuming the whole thing in a giant hug of cosmic appreciation; not in an angry way, filled with rage and vainglory, but in the spirit of high humor, filled with sacred vehemence and divine love.
Do you want to know what true power is? It’s being filled to bursting with sacred humor. It’s being jam-packed with divine love and high humor. It’s what both saints and evildoers alike are afraid of.
There is nothing scarier to an already scared shitless human being going through the motions of being scared in a scary universe, than another human being revealing to them that he/she is definitively not crippled by fear.
This sends their doctrine-filled heads to spinning. It causes true believers with the fear of God in their hearts to shout “blasphemy!” It causes evildoers with the fear of love in their hearts to shout “impossible!” It causes angels to weep and demons to cower. It causes gods to bow at the feet of their true maker: us! Yes, we are the creators of gods.
True power is the revelation that only you have the power to let anybody else have power over you. Pseudo-power is the false power of scared men going through the socially programmed scared motions of being scared human beings in a scary universe.
And the cosmic egg? Well, it is cracked wide open at this point. If this thing we call “life” is indeed a test, then it must be a test of our sense of humor and our sense of playfulness, because from the inside looking out it is all ridiculously laughable.
But that’s also what makes it so devastatingly beautiful. It’s what tears us apart with cosmic joy and earthly jouissance. It’s what has us caught up in the tug-of-war between spirit and flesh, between loving and letting go, between infinity and finitude.
It’s what Ernest Becker realized in his scathing vivisection of modern man, “Primitive man set up his society as a stage, surrounded himself with actors to play different roles, and then invented gods to address the performances to, raising himself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of men.
And to think that when western man first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, he was scornful of what he saw.
That was because western man was already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play. Western man was being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what he doesn’t understand, he proceeded to smash everything in sight.” Praised be the unbound playful heart and the liberated humorous soul!
Just imagine yourself so completely free that even 
