This is not a concept.

I’m really just about done with concepts. Coveting them, clinging to them, and watching people bludgeon each other with them.

The only use of any concept is to be able to temporally isolate something in order to clearly observe it.

Human beings are not all knowing G*ds (and I generally find the people who insist we are on the internet quite irritating, but I digress-) and this is part of our cognition. We isolate particulates of our experience, whether that be identifying another physical object as distinct from our own body, or identifying a mental/conceptual object in order to make our own previously unconscious thought forms visible to ourselves.

This phase, where we isolate the thing and look at the thing and try to understand the thing rather than continue to unconsciously think, say or do the thing- is a necessary phase.

The problem comes in where we’ve decided we really know what the thing means and we’ve got it all on lock. As individuals we look at how our friends, partners, families, groups we are a part of are thinking about the thing or talking about the thing or doing the thing, and soon enough, everyone is referencing that thing constantly with the assumption that we are talking about a shared, fixed, universal lived reality. In fact what is being referred to is a concept, and not only that, we are often wrongly assuming that there is a shared definition of that concept. That’s when we’ve really lost the plot.

We are living through collapse. Part of that collapse is conceptual. As old and institutional structures in our lived reality collapse- ecosystems, climate systems, the functions of government, supply chains, regulations, services- as well as the structures of our intimate lives, families, groups, clubs, memberships- the concepts that once shrouded longstanding dysfunction are hallowing out. That’s why we’re watching Gurus and teachers get exposed and the groups around them imploding left, right and center. Even hidden histories of heroes, groups and movements that have long been held aloft as the shining example of “how it should be done” are coming to light, revealing abuses of power, human complexity, vulnerability and dissonance.

We are learning that nothing was actually how it seemed, when a narrative framework once held the power to hammer flat what was always a highly textured rocky terrain. This is precisely why nostalgia for the past- across the political and ideological spectrum- tends to bemoan the loss of “a simpler time.” It wasn’t really simpler, it was different. The past is not a concept.

Lived reality is alive. The only place to know what’s going on and how it’s working for you or another is in your body, right here and now, with the person or people in your presence. If you are adhering to your concepts about what it’s supposed to be, the present moment doesn’t stand a chance with you.

I choose to make use of specific tools, concepts and frameworks now only insofar as they can give language to the ineffable, or something that can be demonstrably felt and observed in lived reality. This is necessary in our culture because any lived reality that doesn’t fit with the homogenized view of the dominant culture is met with criticism, contempt and exile. It is why people cry with relief when they finally have language to describe what they have felt to be true about themselves or their experience of moving through the world, but were always told was indicative of something wrong with them.

Having the language can create the space to begin to inhabit yourself more fully.

The language is not an endpoint. A concept is just a door, an archway, a threshold. Once you walk through the threshold you walk right back into The Mystery, back to Her, back to No-Thing.

Or, you can stand under the door frame, fist clenched, vigilant. You can defend with the mind what no longer covers the terrifying and vast dreaming of Now.

Be More Like You.

Most practitioners selling something on the internet- coaching, energy work, healing and personal development- use the following formula:

I went through XYZ things [some series of initiatory events]

What I went through turned my life upside down, and I thought I was losing everything [dark night of the soul]

Then, I had XYZ realization! [insert revolutionizing insight]

So I created this system, map, theory, process, protocol

Now I Have It Figured It Out™

Now look at me, I'm on a jet plane, I'm at a café in Paris, I'm at a medicine ceremony, I am having 6 figure months, I am having more sex, I am hotter, I am better than ever, conditions in society no longer affect me...

Come be more like me! I'm going to show you how.

...why is this marketing highly effective?

Because it pulls at the surface level desires of 99% of people in the Western world. Almost everyone wants more money, more sex (or at least the trappings of sexual attention), safety, security and comfort. Many people (although not all) would love to be in control of their own time and only do exactly what they feel like doing. Many people (although not all) want to be able to travel with abandon.

I was talking with a mentor about this a few months ago, about how this doesn't work for me because my own life doesn't fit any kind of story arc that "makes sense" in this type of marketing narrative. I hate the question "how are you doing?" or "what have you been doing?" because I never know how to answer it. I do not organize my self conception around doings and accomplishments, and anytime I have done this in the past, it's performative. It makes me feel like an undercover journalist coming up with a plausible cover story.

She laughed and said "seriously- please DON'T try to be more like me. Not recommended!"

In addition to seeing deeply into the other, which is why I am talented at supporting people one-to-one, I am also a writer. I tend to record my experiences through autobiographical poetic prose. I don't do that out of Main Character Syndrome. To me they are objective field notes. I am an artist, and if I don't let my creativity flow, it comes out sideways or makes me sick.

I often write about spirituality and issues in society autobiographically because it is how it really feels. It's not a grand theory. It is my direct experiencing of the phenomena.

That is what I wish for others and what I support others with- cutting directly to their actual experience, below the programming, below the narrative overlays, below all of the concepts about what their life is supposed to look like or what they are supposed to want and what choices they have been told are the right choices.

Your direct experience is honest and it is only by getting honest that we can start to feel into what is true. Not true like a totalizing truth, but true in terms of what you can feel is true for you, in this moment, deep in the quiet place.

We start there, and then life has a way of growing wild around it.

I don't want anyone to be more like me. I want you to be more like you.