Jed Talks #3

flying and tear down the goddamn curtain

“As to your pain,” I reply to the anguished young man, Zeke, in a way I hope is useful to all gathered, “it’s a blessing if you can put it to good use. You can deny and distract from your pain in a million different ways, or you can go into the pain and see where it takes you. Until you do that, your pain makes you a victim and provides an excuse for inaction. Maybe your particular challenge is real, or maybe it’s the same dynamic I’ve seen a thousand times before. I’ve seen people in hospices and prisons and wheelchairs who didn’t make excuses for themselves, and here you are with every advantage – young, fit, clever, approaching an age where actual awakening is actually possible – but you’re 4F because of flat feet. Rotten luck, dammit; no spiritual warfare for you.

“Maybe your spiritual solution-providers have confirmed your self-diagnosis, but what they should have told you is that this is ego’s standard ploy; make excuses, justify failure, create new attachments, find a convincing reason to sit down, shut up and keep your eyes closed. Fear teams up with vanity so you wear failure like a crown. We spoke earlier, I know you’re a bright guy; educated, sincere, tenacious. I’m not trying to insult you. On the contrary, I see you as a particularly viable candidate for transition to adulthood, but before that can happen you have to achieve full-frontal death-awareness. That’s where the unthinkable becomes the inevitable, where your polarity reverses and you’re drawn toward a future that currently repels you. Until we open our eyes and see who and what and where we are, we’ll never have an informed understanding of our situation and no forward progress will be possible. Once we open our eyes and see our situation clearly, all the ties that bind us to this juvenile identity dissolve and the way forward opens up. It’s not fate or karma or luck, it’s a journey of small steps, each one its own journey. You feel paralyzed because you’re looking ahead when you should be focusing on the next step. It’s like walking a tightrope; the trick is to take it nice and easy, one step at a time, and try not to look down.”

APOWERFULLY-BUILT YOUNG MAN named Zeke, in his early twenties and wearing a Texas A&M shirt, explains to me and those assembled that he has suffered for many years from a kind of “soul-level pain”, and that he’s the victim of anti-spiritual forces which have forged in him some bond of earthly attachment too powerful to break. He’d totally wake up if it were possible, he assures us, but alas, his circumstances are uniquely challenging and the way is not open unto to him. This type of creative rationalization is both common and effective. He has constructed an ego-flattering narrative around what amounts to nothing more than his own spiritual inertia; the tendency of an ass on a couch to stay on a couch.

Peace, happiness, compassion, and contentment have become synonymous with spiritual success. The goal of modern spirituality is not to escape from the dungeon but to make yourself comfortable within it. Many spiritual teachers seem to endorse this view by acting as buddies, counselors and life-coaches, dispensing fluffy love rather than the more effective but less popular tough love. If you’re unhappy about some issue, whether it’s a bad relationship or bad karma or a bad hair day, you just tell your spiritual mucky-muck about it and instead of hitting you with a stick or zapping you with a taser or simply being honest with you, they will help restore your sense of peace, happiness and serenity. Your relationship, karma and hair still suck, but now you’ve had a sip of sugary spiritual Kool-Aid, so it’s okay. These teachers want you to be happy because they want to be liked and thumbs-upped. Me, not so much. I don’t care about your drama or your happiness or your thumb. If anything, I’d like to see you go the other way. My wish for you, if I had one, would be that you become unhappier, that you spiral down into a mortal despair that reaches suicidal intensity. If I were personally invested in your transition, I would hope you achieve that level of burning discontent because only then will you address the underlying cause and not the superficial symptoms. Only then might you break out of self-imposed bondage instead of continuing as a single zombie in a vast undead horde.

The Tao of Pain

I know my words are weapons,

full of danger, full of death.

Walt Whitman

YANG

Being the valley of the world, eternal virtue will be full in you and you return to the state of uncarved wood. Let people return to making knots on ropes instead of writing. When the Tao rules the world, proud stallions pull dung carts.

YIN

Without looking through the window, you can see the way of things. Without going outside, you can know the whole world. The farther you go, the less you know.

The further you travel from the heart of the herd, the colder and darker and lonelier it gets until you find yourself in a barren landscape devoid of human presence. You keep trudging along, one painful step at a time, when off in the distance you see the chimney smoke and warm, glow of a cabin. You knock on the door and are welcomed in by people who went their own way, just like you, who made it this far, just like you, driven by invisible forces, just like you. These are people who understand you and have answers for you, who will take you in and embrace you and tell you that you’ve finally arrived. You never dared to hope that such people actually existed, but now you’ve found them and you’re one of them and you can be with them forever. Your gratitude and relief are inexpressible. Imagine how difficult it is then to realize that this place of comfort and camaraderie is just another temptation where you are once again confronted with the choice of melting back into a womb-like environment, or summoning all the power of will you can muster and going back out into the dark, frigid wasteland to continue a journey in which you not only have no hope of success, but that you’re pretty sure is the stupidest thing anyone has ever done. That lonely trek into the barren wastelands of your dark interior is what the real spiritual journey looks like, and that’s why so few ever awaken in the dreamstate, much less from it. The difference between those who settle into cabin life and those who keep going is their source of motivation. Ego, vanity, and the desire for bliss can only get you so far; the real journey is powered by a molten core burning within. Every time you stop in one of those lovely cabins to sit by the warm fire and enjoy the company, you have to stand back up, strap back into the cold steel of suicidal resolve, and head back out into the dark, lonely night.

BRM-3 is the struggle for survival, and the result is something of a mixed bag. It begins when a ray of light appears through all those stomping hooves revealing, if not a path to safety, at least a direction of travel. It looks like an impossible struggle, but at least now there’s action to be taken.

Ironically, the BRM-3 journey is not about survival but surrender; a long, slow crawl toward personal dissolution. Whatever you cling to during this process will be ripped away, whatever you hide will be found, whatever you extend will be cut off. It’s not that you sever attachments, but that you slice off the parts of yourself that are attached. If thine eye offendeth thee, you don’t sever your emotional attachment to it, you pluck it out and cast it from thee. As your ego-armor gets torn away, you become less attracted to the magnetic pull of the herd. The same forces that were crushing you are now expelling you.

Not to belabor the contraction/relaxation aspect of the delivery process, but it’s another clear parallel. This journey is marked by surges of forward exertion followed by periods of rest and a buildup to the next surge. This cycle repeats again and again, each buildup and surge resulting in a single step, each step its own battle in a seemingly endless war.

Your journey continues until you reach the precipice where only one step remains; the last step of one life and the first step of another. It’s at this point that you die from childhood and are born into adulthood, just as you once died from the womb and were born into childhood. BRM-2 is an ending and BRM-4 is a beginning, but BRM-3 is where the actual journey takes place; where the real war is fought.

The transition from BRM-1 to BRM-2 never comes from desire, goodness, evolution or growth, or any of the placebos, palliatives, and soporifics the pushers in the spiritual marketplace promote. BRM-2 begins when the comfortable herd environment suddenly becomes so toxic and crushing that death is imminent and there’s nothing you can do and nowhere to run. This isn’t just fanciful metaphor or poetic allegory, just as it wasn’t fanciful or poetic when you went through it the first time; the original rude awakening. Don’t remember? You were living in the warm bliss of the amniotic universe as your first experience of life, but it turned very bad very fast and there was nothing you could do about it. This actually happened to you. Imagine being comfortably asleep in your warm, safe bed in your highrise apartment when an earthquake hits like a freight train crashing through your bedroom. Imagine your building collapses and you’re crushed beneath tons of rubble with only acrid black smoke to breathe and no hope of rescue or escape. Imagine that you’re just a baby when that happens. Now stop imagining. You really went through that horrific shit, and just because you don’t consciously remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that it wasn’t the most profoundly influential event of your life.

Imagine a similar thing happening now. Imagine that your environment becomes so crushing and toxic that escape is impossible and death is imminent. One minute you’re managing to keep up with your surrounding herdmates, and the next minute you’re on the ground and there’s nothing you can do but curl up and wait to be trampled to death by the larger organism of which you’re no longer a part. That’s what you can expect in stage two of your birth process, and somewhere inside you know it because you’ve already been through it. You may not consciously remember it, but you’re hellbent on never going through it again.

To put all this in Joe vs the Volcano terms, Belated Rebirth Matrix-1 is Joe at the beginning of the movie where he’s still marching in lockstep with the herd; not happy, but not sufficiently unhappy to do anything about it. BRM-2 is initiated by a dire medical prognosis, but he’s trapped in his circumstances and time is running out, so he just sits around and waits to die. BRM-3 is the journey that begins when Samuel Graynamore knocks on Joe’s door and ends when Joe crosses the lip of the volcano. BRM-4 begins when Joe emerges into a new and superior state of being.

Without the intervention of demon/angel Samuel Graynamore, Joe would have spent the rest of his life with his exotic lamp and adventure books in his dungeonesque office. Graynamore is portrayed as an eccentric industrialist manipulating a poor schlub for his own greedy ends, but by his fruit shall we know him. It was Graynamore who had Dr. Ellison give Joe the false prognosis of a terminal “braincloud” that initiated Joe’s shift to BRM-2. It was Graynamore who then appeared in person and opened Joe’s way forward into and through BRM-3. Graynamore is the one who cut Joe’s bonds, set his journey in motion and delivered Joe to the brink of a new life; Joe himself was mostly just a passenger. Graynamore never achieved his stated goal, but he did set Joe free. Graynamore may appear as a conniving demon, but judging by the fruit of his actions, he is Joe’s liberating angel. That’s how this stuff really works. False saviors ensure our continued imprisonment, while true liberators – falling somewhere on the spectrum between Graynamore and O’Brien – appear as malefactors and monsters. The trick with angels and demons is knowing which is which, but there’s an easy way to tell the difference; the angels are the ones who are trying to kill you.