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Reverse Dominance: The Secret to a Healthy Tribe

Issues

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January 11, 2015

Reverse Dominance: The Secret to a Healthy Tribe

“Every human culture, to remain healthy, sustainable, and vibrant, requires a constant renewal of ceremonies, crafts, cultural practices, and the arts. Each society must generate new knowledge, skills, self-understanding, and modes of self-transcendence. To evolve, a human community must have available a diverse set of authentic and viable social forms that enables it to respond to shifting times, long-term weather patterns, food sources, spiritual needs, cultural longings, and relations with other human groups.” ~ Bill Plotkin

Egalitarianism is a type of social system that has worked for human beings for millions of years, and it has a very adaptive effect in human evolution. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has proposed a social theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a leveling mechanism he calls Reverse Dominance: a social system of checks and balances that maintains egalitarian ethos while preventing a dominance hierarchy from forming.

In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm offers compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory. In this article we will analyze this social theory and see how we might be able to use it to improve things within our own social environments.

Reverse dominance hierarchies are broken down into four different leveling mechanisms: public opinion, ridicule, disobedience, and ostracism. These mechanisms work because human beings are social creatures and hugely influenced by peer pressure and social acceptance.

Let’s break them down and see how we might be able to take the good and leave the bad while applying them to a more modern methodology.

Public Opinion

“He who asks a question is a fool for a minute. He who does not remains a fool forever.” ~ Buddha

This is where the tribe gets together and delivers its checks & balances upon tribal leadership. In some cases chiefs are actually controlled by the public opinion of the tribe.

Usually there is an elder council that comes together to give its opinion, but sometimes the entire tribe is involved. This keeps power from corrupting and definitely prevents absolute power from ever getting the chance to become absolute.

If we blowup the concept of “tribe” and look at it on the scale of a country, groups like Congress and the House of Representatives could be the elder council, but the problem with the large scale dynamic is that it doesn’t seem to work as well, because even the “council” becomes stagnant and power gets entrenched.

Security in power leads to tyranny by nature. One way it could work perhaps, is through a true democratic model based on sortition (rather than election) that maintains the egalitarian ethos. Or to have moral individuals who expiate their power (Capital Munificence), and that’s where ridicule comes into play.

Ridicule

“The first task is to win something; the second, to banish the feeling that has been won; otherwise it is a burden.” ~ A.C. Grayling

This is probably the most important egalitarian leveling mechanism of all, playing upon the guilt and shame regulators inherent within the human condition. Stephanie Segal, had this to say about a !Kung method of ridicule known as “insulting the meet: “In a strange ritual known as insulting the meat, when a man hunts and kills an animal, especially a large one, he is expected to act extremely modest and to minimize the importance of his contribution to the tribe.

In addition, the other tribe members insult his kill by proclaiming how small and worthless it is.” Everyone knows it’s a great kill, but everybody jokes and jeers about it to maintain a sense of humility. This applies to any great achievements.

The goal here is to prevent anybody from becoming too arrogant. It promotes an egalitarian ethos because it prevents anybody from becoming to self-important or taking themselves too seriously or getting to the point where they think they deserve more because of their greatness.

This is one of the cornerstones of a Sacred Clown’s contribution to the “tribe.” Sacred Clowns are preeminent mockers and actually make a playful art out of scorn. If we blowup this concept to make our country the tribe, we can probably see how this might work.

When say a football player scores a winning touchdown and the rest of the team might jokingly jeer at him and poke fun at him. Or maybe when an actor receives an academy award, maybe the crowd could make fun of him/her and take them down a notch.

The same thing could apply across the board, from small social acts like good grades in school to big ones like receiving a Nobel Prize. This makes humility a part of the foundation of a society and can even prevent people from hoarding or taking more than they need.

Best of all, it creates a particularly powerful characteristic that Ernest Becker calls Cosmic Heroism and what I elaborate on with the idea of hero-expiation & capital munificence.

Disobedience

“I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” ~ Thoreau

This is probably the second most important leveling mechanism. Disobedience is a direct way of keeping power checked and balanced. It keeps authority on its toes and prevents power from becoming entrenched. Disobeying an order from an authority creates a ripple-effect within the social dynamic that cannot be ignored.

The authority is forced to check itself and improve upon the given order or demand. Sometimes even morally sound orders are purposefully ignored or mocked simply because the authority giving them is high on power and must be taken down a notch. Similar to public opinion, disobedience prevents power from getting to the point where it can become corrupt.

In our modern day culture we have civil disobedience, but it is still a very rare occurrence. It was made popular by Thoreau and MLK Jr., but most people just use them as talking points and there is no real direct disobedience. Most people are afraid of being disobedient because of the ominous shadow of the state and its threats of violence and imprisonment.

But this is all the more reason to be disobedient. The state is exactly the type of corrupt power that healthy egalitarian cultures use leveling mechanisms to prevent.

As it stands, the state, the very system itself, needs to be deemed unhealthy by public opinion, ridiculed to no end, its authority disobeyed, and its entire nature ostracized. Otherwise a sense of fairness, equality, and morality will continue to elude it.

Like MLK Jr. said, “The hope of a secure livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and spiritual freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist.”

Extreme Sanctions (Ostracism)

“Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.” ~ Rumi

It’s extremely rare that human beings can live alone for long. We are social creatures. We need each other in order to maintain our health (physical, mental, and spiritual). So ostracism is usually a last resort as far as leveling mechanisms go.

Threats of ostracism are usually enough to get people within the tribe to “come around” and cooperate as a healthy member of the tribe. Rarely is ostracism necessary, but sometimes it is.

In which case the ostracized person better get used to being alone or move to another tribe, where he’d better shape up or the same thing will happen again. At any rate, cooperation rather than competition with the tribe is the emphasis, assuming that the tribe is healthy.

When the tribe is not healthy, as with our current system of human governance, then an ostracism of the entire system is in order. As it stands, we live in a system that is built upon competition and that suppresses cooperation.

Such a system is not socially sustainable, and therefore must be ostracized by its members. To quote Perry Buffington, PhD, “If in fact competition brings out the “beast” in us, then research demonstrates that cooperation surely brings out the “best” in us.

This finding has been held in virtually every occupation, skill, or behavior tested. For instance, scientists who consider themselves cooperative tend to have more published articles than their competitive colleagues.

Cooperative businesspeople have higher salaries. From elementary grades to college, cooperative students have higher grade point averages. Personnel directors who work together have fewer job vacancies to fill. And, not surprisingly, cooperation increases creativity.”

Summary

“The wise know to say little, o much, and face the world with cheerful countenance. The question the wise ask is, ‘How long will you delay to be wise?’” – A.C. Grayling

In order to become a healthy society again, or even a healthy species, we need to adopt an ethos of proactive egalitarianism that uses the leveling mechanisms of reverse dominance. It doesn’t have to be serious; it just has to be sincere. And there is no reason why it cannot be playful. Indeed, the drive to play requires suppression of the drive to dominate.

Sincere play should always trump serious work. It will require a mature playfulness, and may even require more of us adopting the Sacred Clown archetype in order to level things out, but there’s no reason to think it is not possible. It must be possible; otherwise we may not survive for much longer as a species on this planet.

Also, children growing up in a social environment that practices proactive egalitarianism, and who are themselves trusted and treated well from the beginning, are more likely to grow up trusting others and treating them well and will feel little or no need to dominate others in order to get their needs met.

This is very important, because if our kids can adopt a culture of proactive egalitarianism, instead of domineering one-upmanship, even just a little bit, then there is hope for the future.

Like Robert Kennedy said, “Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope. These ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Let’s be the person that acts to improve the lot of others so that our children may become tiny ripples of hope.

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Self-inflicted Mythology: The Power of Creating Our Own Myths

Gary Z McGee

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January 11, 2015

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Self-inflicted Mythology: The Power of Creating Our Own Myths

“The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?” ~ Joseph Campbell

All of life is a meditation, whether we are aware of it or not. Put even more succinctly, life is a meditative mythology. We are, each of us, walking, talking myth-machines going through the motions of our mythological projections. In any given culture, we are the hardware, and mythology is the software.

We are naturally creatures of myth. It’s a human need to be told stories, and to tell them. Joseph Campbell described mythology as having four basic functions: the Mystical Function: experiencing the awe of the universe; the Cosmological Function: explaining the shape and image of the universe; the Sociological Function: supporting and validating a certain social order; and the Psychological (pedagogical) Function: how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.

As it stands, our current mythology is somewhat progressive in the cosmological function but seriously lacking in the mystical, sociological, and psychological functions. We, as individual mythmakers, have the power to change this, to create new, healthier stories that work in all four categories. And we must if our species has any chance of surviving on this planet in a healthy way.

When our mythology is one of dominance, control and comfortable inertia, we become stagnant, hard and closed off to the underlying essence. When our mythology is one of passivity, chaos, and orgiastic passion, we become too vulnerable and soft, fragmented and unable to contain the underlying essence.

But when our mythology is one of healthy moderation and balance between these polarities, the underlying essence can be tapped, and the overarching theme becomes a sort of existential solace, or connection to the heart of creation; what Nietzsche called the “Primordial Unity”, which revives the balance between our Dionysian and Apollonian nature.

The more of us creating new, personalized myths, instead of relying upon old stagnant myths, the more likely we are to achieve a higher and healthier state of evolution. In a balanced culture, bad myths will get weeded out and good myths will progress. In an unbalanced culture, even good myths can stagnate and become bad myths that no longer apply.

Like James Russell Lowell said, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.”

One very powerful way of bringing forth this balance is through the art of self-inflicted mythology: the personal creation of living myths. Self-inflicted mythology (the cornerstone of self-inflicted philosophy) bridges the gap between science and spirituality by showing a child-like trust and hope for the human condition, in itself, which leaves open the realm of personalized mystery and enchantment.

It is a way of dreaming away from the world (current myth), in order to discover other-worldly knowledge (new myth) that can then be used in the real world upon our “return.” It’s a Promethean act of courage in the face of the current myth. Its structure is based upon metaphor, simile, and analogy, which keeps our third-eye sharp enough to intuit “otherworldly” mechanisms for perceiving reality, but it also has a direct effect on reality itself.

One must tend to the soul with art, poetry, and myth, with failure and loss, with ambiguity and complexity; rather than soulless, machine-like, diagnosis and treatment. Otherwise the world that’s created becomes unhealthy and unsustainable. It becomes a world where products are primary and people are secondary.

Like Daniel Quinn wrote, “We have an organizational system that works wonderfully well for products. But we don’t have a system that works wonderfully well for people.”

The myths we harbor can work for or against us. Our current myth is a violent, exploitative, dog-eat-dog system. Our duty, if we have the courage, is to update this outdated, unsustainable myth into a healthy, sustainable myth that meets violence with laughter, exploitation with expiation, and the dog-eat-dog system with a human-support system.

“My work is really about changing the old stories — the defining narratives and myths of our civilization, and therefore the institutions and systems that are built on those myths,” says Charles Eisenstein. “They don’t resonate much anymore. We need new stories that will change the world.”

Our tool for changing the world is our own personalized myth. Our vehicle is our meditation.

Our goal is, as Thomas Berry said, “to move the human community from its destructive presence on the planet to a benign or mutually enhancing presence on the planet.”

For those in whom a mythology is healthy, there is an experience of tonality with the human condition, of equilibrium with the cosmos, and an overall sense of symmetry and meaningfulness. For those, however, in whom a mythology is unhealthy, there is an experience of atonality with the human condition, of dissociation with the universe, and an overall sense of asymmetry and meaninglessness. It’s our duty as mythmakers to create responsible mythologies that are healthy contributions to reality.

But first we need to take a step back and think like an outsider. We need to let go of the outdated myths and unhealthy stories that are inadvertently destroying our world. We need to release the old myth in order to embrace our newly created myths. Think past it, around it, inside and out of it. Let it be what it is, and then let your imagination run rampant all over it.

Take the framework of your yester-life and break it, reshape it, widen it, rebuild it out of rubber-bands if need be. The point is to prevent the frame from ever becoming a locked safe. And if it already has, it isn’t too late. You know the combination. And if you’ve somehow forgotten it, then shatter the lock.

You’re the only one who can.

Like Leonardo da Vinci said, “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

Please don’t let humanity become a soul-less destructive mechanism that suppresses love, creativity and imagination. Don’t turn your life into a commodity. Instead, allow your life to become an adventure. Be mythological.

Creative myths are wonderfully cathartic because they cast on the primordial screen of our imaginations archetypal echoes and immense personifications of our hopes and capacities. Mythology bridges the gap between science and spirituality through a kind of mythological methodology: a subjective method of scientific inquiry using archetypal psychology as a vehicle toward discovery.

Mythology is the world on an elephant on a tortoise; science is explaining the infinite fabric of reality beneath the tortoise. Both are needed for the creative scientific-mythological victory over human limitation. We must create our own forms of faith, our own gods, and our own myths.

This will be an arduously Nietzschean task, but a most important one. Human beings make progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative. Like Joseph Campbell said, “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations.”

But societal change is never a black and white issue of total abstinence of outdated traditions to be replaced by the renovated new. History always has, and always will, proceed dialectically. Societal change will be a mixing of the old myth (x) with the new myth (y) to create the hybrid myth (xy), or “new” middle-gray mythology.

Like Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Let’s just make an attempt at taking the good aspects of mythology forward and leave the bad aspects behind.

At the end of the day, creating our own myths is a way of putting our own fingerprint on the history of human evolution. It’s a way of taking old and current myths into consideration, learning from them, and then shedding them like an old skin, so that we can discover something new.

Like Francesca Lia Block said, “Choose to believe in your own myth, your own glamour, your own spell.”

At any rate, it will give people something to do, to help fit them into their own destiny, to help prevent their wandering aimlessly about in an empty, desolate existence. It’s a way of bringing meaning to the meaninglessness in our own unique way, and then sharing it with others.

Like Carl Jung said, “Dream the myth forward.”

Forget genes and memes, take the mytheme and astonish the world.

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Giving Advice and Being the Light for Others

Nikki Sapp

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January 9, 2015

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Giving Advice and Being the Light for Others

“I find the best way to love someone is not to change them but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves” ~ Dr. Steve Maraboli

At a certain point in our spiritual journey we begin to unlock our own inner truth. We no longer are looking to outside sources such as religions, gurus, self-help books, etc. to tell us what to do and how to be, but instead we begin to realize that the answers were inside of us all along.

Not to say that we still don’t read books or open ourselves up to learning from others, but rather we have a more clear connection with our own intuition, which allows us to FEEL the “truth” rather than intellectualize it only.

When we were at the point that we needed outside sources to show us the way, they were coincidentally brought into our lives, either in the forms of other people, reading material, or any modality of spirituality that best fit our own personal needs.

Once, we have graduated from needing the constant affirmation and validation from these outside entities, we most likely will find that we have become the “teacher” that has manifested in someone else’s life in the form of a way-shower.

Then it becomes our turn to be the light on someone else’s path. If you have found yourself in this position, consider your responsibility very carefully. Life is a constant journey of learning and growing, and just like there will be countless teachers on our path of growth, we will also find ourselves in situations that we must be the teacher.

So what is the most effective way of being the light and giving someone advice? How do we go about showing someone the way to their own inner truth while still allowing them to learn their own lessons without our interference?

“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” ~ Bruce Lee

The only person we will have the power to change is ourselves. No matter how much we want the best for someone, want them to be happy, want them to realize their inner light, or want them to be their best self, we cannot force them to do any of these things.

And just like we had to walk our own journey, complete with struggle, adversity, heartache, sadness, anger, etc.. we must realize that all these things are a part of the human experience, so they too will most likely have to go through all of them.

When we give advice to others we must always realize we are only speaking from our own inner truth, the truth as we know it given the situations and circumstances that we’ve experienced.

However, their life is not ours. Their truth will never be exactly the same as our truth because their mind is not our mind and their life has not been exactly as ours has. What we can do however is be in our own awareness and light so strongly that we become an inspiration for them to find their own awareness and light.

If a person comes to us for advice and questions we can’t come up with a million “You need to…” or “You should do this…”, directives, but instead, only point them in the direction of their own inner light and unconditional love. The only advice there ever is to really give is to accept the “what is” and love yourself anyway.

All arrows should point back to unconditional love of the self… no matter if the person is sad, depressed, frustrated, insecure, it doesn’t matter. As long as they have identified the feeling, felt it without resisting it, accepted themselves for having it and loved it, there can be nothing else to do. Without attaching ourselves to the outcome of whether they follow our advice or not, we actually free ourselves and them.

We don’t fear for them, because we trust that their journey is bringing them to the right people and situations that are perfect for them. And they don’t abandon their own inner self by blindly attaching to whatever we are saying as their ultimate truth, which may not always be what’s best for them.

However, if we find that we have been put in another person’s life to help them, guide them or show them something, we must trust that the Universe is speaking through us in the best and most effective way possible. Without doubting ourselves, we find that our inner light shines automatically and manifests in the best way possible for all parties involved, as long as we trust that it always will.

“As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.” ~ Marianne Williamson

We will sometimes be students and we will sometimes be teachers in life. Since we cannot ever know everything about everything, we will find that this role reversal happens over and over throughout our lives.

The most amazing thing about all of this is that as soon as we think we are giving someone else advice and showing them the way, as most teachers know, we realize that we were also giving ourselves the same advice.

Sometimes the Universe brings another person to us in the form of a student, but in actuality in our helping of them, we are actually helping ourselves with the same issue. By being in the form of another person, we were able to look at the situation in a different way, from a 3rd party perspective, that we weren’t able to do when dealing with ourselves and our own life.

As always, we must be the change we wish to see in the world. In doing this, we find that we always attract the right people into our lives, either to teach us something about ourselves or to be the teacher for them.

But if we really pay attention and become super aware of how things happen in this ironic Universe, we realize…. it is always both.

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Creating your own Peaceful Warriors: 5 Ways to Teach Meditation to Children

Lauren

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January 8, 2015

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Creating your own Peaceful Warriors: 5 Ways to Teach Meditation to Children

“Breathing in, I know the anger is in me. Breathing out, I will take good care of my anger.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘Is Nothing Something’.

As a society we are becoming increasingly familiar with the agreement that meditation is as beneficial to children as it is to adults, bringing about greater degrees of relaxation and self-reflection from an early age.

But the kind of meditation we might use when teaching our children how to be peaceful warriors will effectively take quite a different shape to the ones we’re familiar with and can require time and wisdom to get the right one for your child.

Traditional Vipassana and ‘breathing’ exercises, though excellent tools to teach, (as, after all, breathing is the one thing we all have in common), can seem a little abstract or hard to grasp for kids under the age of eight.

Children, particularly between the ages of three and six, are usually bouncing off the walls and reverberating in that rare but precious energy that should not be squashed or disregarded, but celebrated and used to heighten awareness.

Much like any meditation techniques, the best thing is to find activities that bring awareness to everyday tasks, as we would in retreat setting; combining working, walking, karma yoga… anything and everything we engage in throughout the day can be used to hook the meditation.

If there are three main forms of meditation; breath, chanting and object meditation, then the same goes for the latter two – singing, humming and focusing on an object or sounds can be excellent ways to increase focus for kids, and means that you don’t always have to introduce techniques in a set ‘meditation slot’; instead introducing anchors that would nicely combine with your child’s interests.

My daughter is a great example. Being the most willful and stubborn gem of a girl, teaching meditation has had a few false starts to say the least. In other words – the moment she senses she’s being taught anything, she will resist.

Using movement and animal imitation (something she loves doing on a daily basis), has proven to be the best way to do a creative meditation, whereas color visualization and massage lends itself better to a calming night ritual where another child might prefer listening to sounds and humming.

Whatever your child’s interests and unique personality, you can use it to your advantage and get creative devising different meditations to suit them and you. A bit like spell-making, it just needs a few ingredients and some imagination. Here are 5 ways to teach meditation to children

Focus on what your child is interested in

Just as you would when teaching them counting or reading. If they like making pictures, make it visual. If they like making a noise, make up a song or chose one that is more on the spiritual side than usual. Meditation is often connected to the five senses and can be built around one or two of them.

teaching children meditation using creative ideas

Experiment with objects

Just getting a child to hold an object (chosen by them of course), describe it and feel it slows them down and makes them more aware. As Lorraine E. Murray writes about in Calm Kids, when children are fully awake they are in the Beta state, but when they’re in Alpha state, noticing their surroundings without analyzing or thinking they’re closer to a meditative state that leads on to the Theta/dream state that adults can reach through ‘no thought’, their brains being fully developed neurologically. Favorite objects can be collected on an altar or in a special area of their play tent to help them develop and take control of their own ‘spiritual time’.

Have a lively ‘wake up’ meditation in the morning involving physical play (swinging arms like monkeys, stomping like elephants, tapping various chakra points on body etc.), and a more calming ritual before bed (chanting simple chants, watching the stars on the balcony, visualizing a color that they’re drawn to for that day and using words you link to that color i.e. orange – ‘you’re feeling warm and confident, happy and sunny’.

Music, candles and particular cushions/areas of the house can be dedicated to meditation, but the more you get kids to look within without these external props the better. Such things can help set the scene or be nice evening ritual to prepare them for bed.

Involve gratitude

Have a gratitude prayer that you might start to see if they join in, or take turns to say three things you’re grateful for that happened that day.

Becoming aware of emotions

During the day, build up the habit of becoming aware of emotions. For example, if your child is upset, sit with them and get them to link it to one core ‘negative’ emotion (mad, sad, scared). Get them to recognize this emotion, perhaps where they feel it in their bodies, what color it is. Once this habit has been introduced, or if they’re a little older, they can use breath to breathe into/send love to the emotion before cuddling themselves.

OR Do ‘volcano breath’ for angry reactions (a few sharp outtakes, then an ‘explosion’ at the sky rather than another person) or ‘Buddha/cloud’ breathing (slow and deliberate) for scared or sad feelings. Clenching and unclenching fists and asking them to imagine them slowly letting sand trickle through their fingers or blowing things they can do nothing about away like feathers are other ideas.

Work with obstacles

Generally, work with obstacles rather than against them. For example, if your child has difficulty keeping their eyes closed, use a visual tool like following a finger or an instruction like ‘look at the sky, look at the ground.’ Like children’s yoga, it’s often best to keep things moving or involve a story element to hold their interest.

Even things like walking to the bus stop can become a game and meditation in disguise. Count your steps together, march, count the birds you see along the way, walk slowly (you may need to be a bit of an exhibitionist, but let’s face it, who cares what others think!)… Try collecting a certain type of object to add to the altar back home, like stones or leaves.

All these suggestions are simply jumping off points for further ideas that will evolve as your child ages and you become bolder and more experimental. The joy of any children we come into contact with and those in our care is that they often lead the way; down unknown roads we never dreamed of.

Meditation and play will ultimately connect us with our own inner child that looks at the world with wonder. One we might’ve long since left behind.

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Jester Guru Chronicles, Part 4: The Cosmic Joke

Issues

Gary Z McGee

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January 5, 2015

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Jester Guru Chronicles, Part 4: The Cosmic Joke

“There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.” ~ Mark Twain

Life is a joke. Reality is a thought in free-fall holographically projected through space. It’s a big fat billowy dream of things seeming to be the case that are not even the case at all. It’s a series of illusory moments bleeding into other illusory moments that are all mocking the “here and now” in a dance of meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe.

Indeed, it’s a terribly absurd clash of meaning against meaninglessness, of finitude against infinity, of light against dark. And here we are: these little descendants of stars in stinky meat sacks trying to make sense of it all. Yes, life is a big joke, and a terribly told one at that.

But the question is: are you laughing at the joke or are you the butt-end? Are you caught in the throes of absurdity or have you let it all go with a trickster dance and a mighty laugh? Are you a drowning duck or are you the duck that has perfected the art of letting water roll off its back?

The good thing is: there is more than one way to skin Schrödinger’s cat. For example: I’m a quantum-mechanic dissecting the cosmos and exorcising the ghost in the atom with Occam forceps, Zeno skull-clamps, and a Planck-sized scalpel in superpostion with its own cut.

And I’m here to tell you that you’ve been duped. You’ve been bamboozled. You’ve been hoodwinked by political claptrap and religious codswallop. You’ve been overly spoon-fed. But, here’s the real kick in the pants: you’re doing it to yourself.

You’ve swallowed belief and sidestepped thinking for yourself. You’ve blindly revered parochial traditions. You’ve taken to heart too many hand-me-down philosophies. You’ve taken them too seriously. You’ve taken yourself too seriously. In short, you have not questioned things enough. Questioning should only ever be to the nth degree, lest we inadvertently become the playthings of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen.

Question everything. Question even this diatribe about questioning things. It’s the only way to guard against being the butt-end of the joke.

Like Aldous Huxley said, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Truth is not readily evident. Healthy transformation is not a given. It takes massive amounts of discipline, a riot of the heart against preconceived convention. One must be able to transform fear into courage and pain into strength and both into art. And then counterintuitively be able to laugh at it all.

Our small minds drive us toward stability, security, and pacification of the senses. But we need more variability, vulnerability, and provocation. We need bigger minds with simpler urges and the plasticity to handle the vicissitudes of change, because change, the only impermanent permanent, is the slap in the face that follows the cosmic joke.

We either honor it with laughter and high humor, or we dishonor it with stagnant ideals and stuck-in-the-muck religiosity. We live in a world of hungry ghosts that should not be fed. Rather, they should be transformed into something of substance, something that can feed itself.

Like Tom Robbins said, “We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

This process begins first by admitting how we are victims, and then being proactive about how to become a hero, how to become a person with the capacity to laugh at the cosmic joke instead of a person crippled from being the butt-end of it. Let’s empower the victim. Let’s exorcise the ghost.

Let’s slay the dragon. Better yet, let’s hug the demon and transform it into an ally, a powerful muse that we can use as an inspiration to navigate through the joke. Let’s grow in fits of courage and self-liberation.

Let’s push through existential thresholds sharp enough to cut our souls, and then let’s regroup to lick our wounds, to seek the consolation of our comfort zone so that we can mend. Then we can do it all over again.

Like Anaïs Nin said, “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

Indeed, the greatest of all arts is the art of healthy self-transformation. And the greatest method toward perfecting this art is questioning things to the nth degree.

Like the Buddha said, “He who asks a question is a fool for a minute. He who does not remains a fool forever.”

So it is that I will continue to be a reminder of the contingency and arbitrariness of the human condition. I will continue to elude your conditioned notions of right and wrong.

I will forever refuse to correspond with your outdated notions of good and evil. I will continue to play pranks on you and laugh at your seriousness, not to make you feel embarrassed or stupid, but to show you ways that you can start being more humorous and less self-serious. There’s no certainty, only opportunity. Vi veri veniversum vivus vici: by the power of truth we, while living, shall conquer the universe.

In the end, your life is your message. Will it be a life of contained ownership, or liberated detachment? Will it be a life of remaining a victim to the violent philosophy of others, or a life of becoming a hero with the courage to create a philosophy of humor and love? Will it be a life of being the butt-end of the joke, or a life of laughing at the joke despite it?

High humor can be your saving grace, but first you must laugh, and laugh hard, at all the false gods and false men you’ve propped up around you to keep yourself safe and contained. Laugh at it all, because I assure you they are laughing at you.

Forget “I think therefore I am.” That’s old hat. Embrace “I think therefore I laugh.” That, my friends, is where the gold’s at.

Image source:

Laughing Buddhas
Intelligence
Anansi
Wittgenstein quote

Fractal Enlightenment

Reverse Dominance: The Secret to a Healthy Tribe

Let’s break them down and see how we might be able to take the good and leave the bad while applying them to a more modern methodology.

Public Opinion

Ridicule

Disobedience

Extreme Sanctions (Ostracism)

Summary

Self-inflicted Mythology: The Power of Creating Our Own Myths

Giving Advice and Being the Light for Others

Creating your own Peaceful Warriors: 5 Ways to Teach Meditation to Children

Whatever your child’s interests and unique personality, you can use it to your advantage and get creative devising different meditations to suit them and you. A bit like spell-making, it just needs a few ingredients and some imagination. Here are 5 ways to teach meditation to children

Focus on what your child is interested in

Experiment with objects

Involve gratitude

Becoming aware of emotions

Work with obstacles

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