long philosophical Q&A

When I get a little quiet, the question arises, what game am I playing? The follow-up is of course: is this the game I wish to play?

I've dabbled in a bunch of interesting approaches to life in recent years. These have included the games of musicmaking, nonviolent communication community, mythopoetic men's retreats, plant medicines, tantra, polyamory, and so forth. Each has offered a fun orientation toward living a more deeply satisfying life, though perhaps none fulfilling their promise, at least for me. So what's it all about?

Things were good in Burque before I left a year ago. The job was loving me, I was socking away $500 a month, and had a pretty cool little place with a growing community of friends nearby. Even a brief flowering of love, or something near to it, had unfolded for a moment.

Things were good in OB too--great in some ways. I loved the movement into a new scene, the sweet community I grew into, the ocean, a variety of new stimuli for the muse. While the job was progressively awful, and the Anglo-trafficky-urbanness generally annoying, there was a lovely sense of unfolding for me there.

I missed the window to transfer out there to a better store, out of misplaced loyalty to a lousy boss. That could have been a useful move. But there were forces of awareness also pushing my envelope toward a post-capitalist experience and a taste of street living.

When I honestly look at all aspects of political, moral, ecological and existential information available, integrity calls for some radical choices. And living without money, as much as possible, is one very viable and vibrant choice, lending itself to direct learning and often luminous clarity.

It is similar to the choice to become vegan in that regard: another obvious choice once one takes the blinders off of our awareness. Yet I choose neither veganism or living without money. I find in such purity of choice I actually lose balance between the clear light of my A dimension, and the needs of my U dimension for certain murky elements which are actually supported by unconsciousness. The capacity to sleep is related to this.

Nevertheless, I continue to pursue awareness. I am certain there is no perfect alignment between these dimensions of awareness and drive. It has been my ego's endlessly frustrating trip to try and merge these, since such a taste of such paradise at age 19. It's since proven more of a trap than a game. And from an ecological perspective, there are not nearly enough Earths to support each one of us fully self-actualizing, at least according to some decrepit upper-middle class esthetic.

As folksinger Utah Philips points out, we are educated for many impressionable years with someone else's class background. Taught the history of the ruling class, we have few references as to how to make useful choices when facing the demands of life directly. We think we must be somehow great, in the eyes of some projected world. Then, it turns out we ourselves are those eyes! And we then face the task of gathering truly useful resources. And we truly begin to seek authentic meaningful connections with one another, find our teachers and ancestors, seek wisdom in poems and conversations with trees...and from whatever else we can pull out of the river of human life experience gifted to us by others having coped with living on this Earth.

I recognize this is the field, at least, that I have been playing on. Often in daily living, amidst work and conventions, there is little reflection back to me from which I can gather meaning. This quest for the muse to unfold my humanness often seems vague and adolescent in terms of the world's judgment. At best, it is a poet's game, or a vastly overextended phase of finding myself.

But this self-evaluation is not my concern. I have been on this course since I was a small child.

In Santa Fe, somewhere underneath the high rents of its adobe disneyland, there is a common cultural understanding of this quest for direct spiritual unfoldment. There are still mushrooms sprouting in the mountains, various pagan ceremonies, and the inherent paradox of living at 7000 feet. There are rich and varied cultural references of the experiences of Native American traditions near, persisting in the people and the landscapes both. There is also a whole new age lexicon of stuff like the lost continent of Lemuria, Mayan calendar predictions since the Harmonic Convergence, Akashic records, and a million other occult offerings. And while some may be more useful or imaginative than others for our individual tastes, all these references point to cultural acceptance of focusing somewhere beyond the daily conventional grind.

Spending twenty years in this cultural milleu, I have sought several times to live elsewhere and compare notes experientially. Burque, at 5000 feet, offers some strange in-between land, where translation between the inner and outer worlds may be possible. But the general rules of the game remain the same anywhere...arrange the externals as simply as possible, in order to allow the dance between the yin and yang to unfold.

By moving back and forth between awareness and drive, there is not so much synchronization that comes, but an unfolding of the field--the canvas--of our lives. A concomitant geometric spiral of existential frustration also grows within the unrealizable potential of immortality we imagine for ourselves therein. And that is the illusion of maya-world referred to in some areas of Buddhism.

But then something strange happens on the journey. Amidst absolute and utter failure of all that is personal in this life, ultimately the failing of health itself for each of us...amidst that utter dark emptiness, something else pops up. And there is nothing to describe it really. But Viktor Frankl definitely found it, and offered some nice references in his Logotherapy book, Man's Search for Meaning. Thich Nhat Hanh, who like Frankl faced genocidal-level suffering, also describes it clearly in books such as Being Peace.

What arises in the void is the capacity that remains within us to proactively smile and vibrate Yes!

This startling activity proves somehow satisfying to the deep longing that comes through such a dark night. This satisfaction proves independent of any attachment to the external aspects of whatever we are saying yes to in the world. The commitment of that moment's Yes!, this essential activity of our humanness, is inherently radical, cutting across robotic activity of all kinds. Yet rather than insisting on traumatic revolution, it offers an ongoing joyful invitation into the aliveness of this moment.

Some people call it gratitude practice, and that seems correct to me. Either way, magnetism happens from the genius-zone of this gift beyond ego. Energy radiates out from this zero-point, and affects the world, bringing new light in. It may last a moment or an hour or a month, touch that one customer in line and then be gone, channel a song through, or stir up a whole new beatnik counterculture scene...

Whether it is through plant medicines, empathy practice, hara meditation, postural breathing, hugging a tree, dancing, sound vibrations, just smiling, tantra, or gratitude...

this is the game I am playing