To define is to literally make finite, so we won’t do that. But we can think of God as The All: every speck of matter, every iota of consciousness.

Every star and every quark.

Everything.

All of it.

In addition to having no Other, The All is traditionally considered already infinitely loving, infinitely perfect, infinitely good. Good, after all, derives from God. Something that is good is just something godly.

We might say that if The All can’t be defined, we can’t describe it with one half of a binary. But if it isn’t anything, if it is nothing, if it is everything, we could call it whatever we want.

I think “good” is good enough.

But if The All is good, and all things are in the All… what the actual fuck is up with all these Nazis?

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Why write if you won’t tackle the Big Questions?

I went on a sabbatical from this blog for around six months after my son was born. It was for a variety of reasons. They included everything from mental health crises to deep philosophical, existential uncertainty about the possibility of being Visible in a world that incentivizes Creators to side with (or reinforce-via-protest) the blooming fascist movement.

The Sabbatical Series so far includes my reflections on seeking Resonance rather than metrics in my writing, and avoiding conjuring Dick-First (toxically masculine) energy when manifesting my personal “cozyweb” Digital Sangha—a small, safe, secluded, cozy online space.

The present essay deals with the Nazi problem that helped prevent me from writing for half a year.

The incentives and media infrastructure of our profoundly sick society continually attempt to railroad Creatives into being won over by what Naomi Klein calls the “embrace of selective belonging” which, to me, seems almost hypnotically wielded by the alt-right. Even worse, the culturally sanctioned and algorithmically promoted ways to protest that movement themselves make the unwanted problem even worse. Most simply by giving the Nazis something to use as a recruitment tool.

As Ram Dass says, “Hippies Create Police. Police Create Hippies. If you're in polarity you're creating polar opposites.”

As Eckhart Tolle says, “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.”

As Lao Tzu says, “Give evil nothing to oppose, and it will disappear on its own.”

So here is the third Big Question that led me to take a sabbatical from Creekmason creativity.

In order to be a public intellectual, you need to be selling a solution. In order to sell a solution, you need to have a problem. If your solution is already sold to all the people who naturally agree that your problem is part of their lives, you need to inflate that problem or make it scarier.

Being a public intellectual on today's internet naturally means adding more fear to the world.

Can I share my “special me-ness” without falling into this trap?

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If God is good, and All is God, and Shadows exist in the All… Shadows must be Good too.

It wasn't David versus Goliath, it was a pendulum
Eternally swayin' from the dark to the light
And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast
It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance
And like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got
The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled
So I got older and I learned to relax
And I learned to soften and that dance got easier

~ Ren, Hi Ren

What if, instead of fear of an Other that sells tickets to courses, my writing focuses on spreading a posture of appreciation? Appreciation of the ever-swinging pendulum between darkness and light.

What if my art could be language and meaning that supports celebration of the rhythmic highs and lows constantly compensating for one another in that inevitable cycle through endless time.

Consider that when you zoom out, even the dualism of Nazi and Antifa can be included, though not morally equivalent, as the energetic poles on a wavelength of a singular All.

The ups and downs of a wave through the air? That’s sound. A note struck. A chord played. The vibration of the infinitely good Word the Bible says there was “in the beginning,” still being articulated.

The Word itself is The All.

There must be learning available through both the highs and lows. Through both the Light and Shadows of The All.

Learning is what we’re here to do.

We are the Universe experiencing itself.

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Why did the Universe want to experience Nazis?

As a species we have agreed to incarnate in order to learn the lessons of separation.

That is, the lessons that are only available when we believe that we are separate individuals: ”individual” units of being that cannot (in-) be divided (-dividual) further.

An atom might seem like a separate thing, but zoom out and it, along with other atoms, simply appears to be a molecule. A single molecule, when we zoom out and take it together with other molecules, looks like a single cell. A being is one entity composed of many cells. A civilization is one thing made of many beings.

The All is all of it and more: other planets, other stars, the space between them.

Zoom out enough and everything is inside the picture frame.

Everything is actually one thing.

But zoomed in to the level of a human incarnation, it sure seems like we’re separate. We each have our own name! I can’t move your hand with just a thought. I can’t feel your emotions.

But think. Referential language and the privacy of thoughts and emotions are not absolute. We could communicate telepathically and they’d all disappear.

But we, as a collective of Soul making plans in the Liminal Bardo, agreed to create and incarnate into a species that thinks itself separate.

Why? One lesson that would be impossible without the illusion of differentiation is that Shadows must be good too.

Speaking of a fae creature that knows the future, Patrick Rothfuss writes in Wise Man’s Fear:

“A blind man has to stumble through a cluttered room. You don’t. You use your eyes and pick the easy way. It’s clear to you as anything.”

That is our Higher Selves. The aspect of you or me that is outside of time doesn’t have to fumble its way through the future. It can pick the easy—or hard—way. It can pick whatever way is required.

And I guess that the Higher Self that has come as me—which is like a wave in the same ocean as the phenotypically different wave that is the Higher Self come as you, aspects of the same body of water that only seem distinct when you’re zoomed in—wanted to figure out what it felt like to ride out a polycrisis with Fascists at the helm.

This long-haired hippy idiot isn’t about to say Nazis are a good thing, is he?

There are actions that cannot be a part of an infinitely good God.

Working from my own interpretation of Paul Selig’s channeled literature, while a conscious being is invoking duality via believing that they are a separate self, duality is real. And while duality is real, actions that deny God are possible.

As is often said, we shouldn’t confuse the map for the territory. The words and models used to describe a phenomenon inevitably require shortcuts. A several mile stretch of beautiful shoreline textured with jagged cliffs and caves is simplified to a mostly straight line. A vibrant city with its own character and history is reduced to a dot, identical to every other city’s dot.

The concept of a reality filled with discrete, disconnected, separate individuals is an inaccurate map of the nondual—singular, unified, “not two,” forget more than two—territory you get when you zoom out and capture the whole universe in the picture frame.

But it seems that, paradoxically, while a being believes it to be true, that being can act as if it is true. The map (separation) becomes the terrain of another map (a belief that there are parts of reality outside of God), and in this recursive way, it is real. The being who believes in separation, can step into the darkness that denies God and create immense pain from that place that appears to be outside of or incompatible with goodness (i.e. godliness).

Furthermore, there is suffering that is just suffering when viewed from inside the human experience. An experience that is nearly impossible to be outside of while you’re still alive on Earth.

There are circumstances that do not make us stronger. Not at the level of the small “s” self, which is, of course, all we truly know.

To say “everything happens for a reason” to a hurricane victim, or a woman who has lost her pregnancy, or even someone whose cat got hit by a car… that’s the epitome of callous spiritual bypassing. Of avoiding confronting challenging feelings by putting on airs of phony holiness.

But what’s more: to say “everything happens for a reason” to a victim of human cruelty and evil? Unthinkable. Almost an evil in itself.

And yet.

Can we frame Shadow as resistance? Can we frame fear—and everything downstream from it, from greed, to exploitation, to murder—as a force resisting the infinite abundance, love, perfection, and goodness of The All?

For fear to operate, there needs to be a belief in the existence of separation. If All is one, there is nothing to fear. It’s like fearing my own hand might slap me silly.

“So what,” you say?

Well, don't we always need resistance in order to get stronger? Weights are heavy. That means they resist being lifted. But in lifting them, we grow. Yes we tear muscle in small ways. There is likely pain. But through the opportunity created by rupture, there’s a chance for repair, and that regrowth is what makes a muscle stronger.

But if it isn’t our small “s” selves growing, what is it that benefits from our struggle against the resistance created and inhabited by Shadow?

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The All as a Soul Field—as mist that condenses into matter.

Let’s visualize The All as a vaporous ocean of Soul that condenses—“becomes denser” by vibrating more slowly—to form matter. Like steam freezing into ice. But the vapor can also animate matter, as if the steam could somehow make one snowman see its neighbor as inferior and worthy of extermination.

Consciousness—Soul: the vapor—can find ways to express whenever it encounters a complex system of dense matter—Soul: the ice. According to Integrated Information Theory, this can be something as simple as a thermostat changing the same room temperature it senses, to something as complex as the human brain.

There are aspects of this Soul Field that choose to incarnate (It's us! Or rather our Higher Selves), or that express as cooperative, complex collectives of beings like an ant hive or the egregore that is a corporation, or, so I believe, that speak to those of the incarnated who have mediumship abilities.

There's a lot we can explain by positing that there are also aspects of the Soul Field that manifest as ”Shadows that must be good too.” Whether it’s literal or not, we can think of these aspects of Soul that exist in duality, outside of goodness, as aliens if we wish—aliens that feed on fear.

These “aliens” are sometimes described as aspects of the Soul Field that eat the painful emotional energy, called “loosh,” created through negative experiences.

These are the negative experiences that we might put outside of God. Experiences so terrible that they can’t possibly be contained in a perfect All. That call into question the very perfection of the All.

But that Shadow of loosh feeding aliens...

Of the tech bros that those “aliens” inspire to do Nazi salutes at the inauguration (imagine the loosh that flapping arm generated!)...

Even me when those “aliens” get in my head and trick me into stepping outside of the Light to drag the person who cut me off in traffic into the Shadow. To drag that Tesla driver outside of God by judging them as Bad. Condemning them as something separate from me, a Good driver...

These are all contained within the All if you just zoom out enough.

None of them is a thing to fear.

Not anymore than we should fear the resistance of a barbell our capable muscles strain to lift.

All Practice Involves Resistance

All practice involves a low point (when the weight is at its nadir and you're not sure you can bench it again) that precedes a return to the target state.

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And it's the motion of the return—that muscle flex—that expands God's knowledge of itself and drives the All toward greater complexity, wholeness, beauty, goodness, love, and divinity. These are the things the Soul Field, The All, God, is fundamentally composed of but can’t experience without inventing separation.

All those positive qualities are already maximally expressed in The All’s perfection, but paradoxically, the All doesn’t know what they are like until it learns about them through the separate beings it creates and incarnates into.

Every opportunity is an opportunity to know yourself in a new way. In the face of pain, you may know yourself in strength. In the face of loss, you may know yourself as gifted. In the face of death, you may know yourself as alive.

~ Paul Selig, The Book of Knowing and Worth

All practices (from lifting weights to meditation to lovingkindness to maintaining a Positive Mental Attitude) definitionally involve a lapse or low point that you’re practicing recovering from.

As Sharon Salzberg says, “the healing is in the return.” With many practices it’s actually the muscle flex of getting back to the target state that is the whole point.

The athlete, the torn muscle regrowing stronger, and the barbell are all part of God. What else could they be?

Similarly, the Light, the lessons we came to learn in human school, and the Shadow are all God.

Once again: Shadows must be good, too.

Although a Shadow couldn’t enact the evil it does without claiming itself apart from God, it can’t really get outside of The All. The Shadow is still an element of the Wavelength. Still an aspect of the Soul Field.

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You may be thinking, “No part of me is a Nazi!”

But each of us are the ocean in a drop rather than a drop in the ocean. All is contained within each. Each is All.

My Nazi shadow is the one that recognizes the supremacy of whatever ideology I prefer to Naziism. The supremacist part of me wants all people to find my ideas just as valuable as I do. The fascist in me believes we could all get along if everyone just agreed with me about love, soul, anarchy, diversity and tolerance.

It seems obvious that there's a good kind of "everyone should think and behave like me" at a certain zoom level. That's how we resolve “the paradox of tolerance”: we don't tolerate intolerance.

Without Nazis, the Soul Field couldn’t learn that nothing, not even tolerance, is absolute.

Without the Shadow, there would be nothing to contrast the light. No foil for its beauty. But also, the All would have no way to learn about that which we leave the Light to drag into the Shadow—characteristics we pretend are not within our capabilities, like intolerance and believing that some ideas are superior to others.

Nazis are abhorrent.

And in overcoming the Nazis, the universe becomes more conscious and compassionate.

The struggle that the Nazis create—the obstacle to consciousness and compassion—is part of the path, in the way that all obstacles are. When we, as a civilization, handle our Nazi problem, we will be a stronger and more compassionate civilization than we were before the Nazis showed up.

We will have learned what a more powerful experience of the sanctity of life is like by defeating a force that degrades life and profanes against it.

But somehow we have to do so without profaning against life ourselves.

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Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Only love can drive out hate…” I’d add: more hate might move books, though

As Duncan Trussell says, the incentive for someone who sells umbrellas is to make sure it keeps on raining.

The incentive of a public intellectual—a political influencer—who decries fascism is to actually empower the fascists so they, the influencer, get more followers. More paid subscriptions. More people signing up for their courses.

They have to either convince more people the Others are scary or, sometimes, subconsciously find ways to materially empower the Others so they truly are scarier.

To say nothing of greed, simply because of inflation, our economy demands endless growth simply for subsistence.

That rule applies to influencers too.

The possibly-not-metaphorical loosh-feeding-aliens are the only ones who win. The righteous influencer creates fear for them to feed on. The abhorrent influencer uses the righteous one’s success as a recruitment tool. More fear. More duality. More Shadow.

I think we’ve learned enough. I think we’re ready to be done with Naziism. I truly believe that despite how dark things seem, we’re moments away from putting Nazis firmly in our past and manifesting the more loving society our hearts know is possible.

We may still learn through Shadow in the eternal dance, but let it be a new Shadow. Perhaps it could be a less abhorrent shadow, closer to the Universe’s ultimate destination of the reunification of God?

So when it comes to returning from sabbatical, my objective is to come down clearly in favor of protest, but not concretize the problem by becoming a participant in the market that sells protest.

Instead, I intend to use this space to platform the Wavelength itself. Could this be what I am here for? Could this calling be why I developed the mood symptoms that earned me a Bipolar diagnosis?

I want to attract Sangha members who can flirt with the notion that our Shadow is just another aspect of the same wavelength, the same eternal dance, the same Soul that has come as you or me.

The swelling of a wave, its crest, its crash, its return to the ocean… any of these might appear to be a distinct phenomenon when zoomed in closely enough. When I list them as I’ve just done—with different words naming them, with commas separating them—they seem distinct.

Language creates an illusion.

Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out.

There is only a wave. There is only water. There is only Earth. There is only Soul.

All is in The All.

All dualities. All binaries. Just the highs and lows of a single infinitely good Wavelength.

Light is good. And so our Shadows must be good too, because what else could they be?

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Lastly. This essay is pretty much dedicated to , whose musings and provocations on the Creekmason Discord inspired syntheses and responses that helped me answer one of my Sabbatical’s “Big Questions.” Thanks fren!

Thoughtforms present in that 18-year-old’s design decision in the physical Creek where the Creekmason concept was born continue to echo into the present. Patterns to be alchemized. Dick-First—patriarchy-prioritizing and -perpetuating—issues like abuse, toxic masculinity, and Crazy Wisdom in guruship.

As a visible figure in the Creekmasons, I’m in danger of expressing those aspects of masculine programming. Even if I somehow avoid it, though, I might still have them projected onto me so convincingly that I thoughtlessly adopt the offered role.

How, in light of that, can I possibly feel safe returning from sabbatical?

(Note, this essay is a little too long for email. Please head to Substack to read the whole thing)

The Dick on the Threshold

Back to the Realm of Pseudo-Nature. To get into the Creek where the Thrones are located, you have to either hop a fence or mountain goat down a moderately steep bank, walk under a little overpass in which local artists are in a constant paint based tug of war with city employees, and then trudge a ways through a field of bluish grey stones.

Sometimes there is a trickle of water and you’re walking downstream, stepping from half-submerged stone to stone with delicate balance if you want to keep your shoes dry. These days, the Creek is more often dried up. Chalk up another total catastrophe on the polycrisis scoreboard.

So you’re walking through the Creek, through a field of rocks, and the first rock that you see that was moved by a Creekmason is The Dick.

The Dick is not really a rock. For some unknown reason, someone overfilled a bucket with concrete and left it that way, apparently leaving the Creek to erode away the bucket. So what’s left is a big, cylindrical (shaft-like) chunk of cement that was contained by a bucket and a kind of mushroom top where the cement overflowed from the bucket’s top.

As I’ve said before, I was often stoned enough to find meaning in everything and the name The Dick was “low hanging fruit” here.

I placed it—“head” first if you’ll excuse the vulgarity—at the front of what I called the Great Retaining Wall. The Wall was a sort of masonry fence that I intended to protect the Thrones from the week or so of waste-high current that is all that most of our mild California Winters can muster.

Why did I want to greet everyone who came to the Creek with The Dick?

Primarily? I was in late adolescence—a barely-grown manchild of the ‘90s—and I thought it was funny. It also seemed like a good way to divide and deflect the water that would assault The Thrones during the coming winter.

Having recently returned from Sabbatical, I find myself prompted to reflect on the Creekmasons being a Dick-First Organization. Should the loud, upfront, childish masculine continue to divide the Creek? Should phallic energy deflect the watery emotional aspect that finds its way to us?

The railroad tracks lead in that direction. Can we knock the train off course?

I am a speaker for the Creekmason platform. Can I use my voice to establish the practice of mindful alchemy as a way to end the unconscious re-enactment of abusive patriarchy? Can my actions instill the value of repair and restoration as primary?

The healing, after all, is in the return. Isn’t that the point of community? To orient to seeking harmony, but in the inevitable event of rupture, regrow stronger?

Am I up to it?

Can I be Trusted with Leadership

That joke about the loud, upfront, childish masculine on the threshold is as close as I intend to come in this essay to “vague-booking”—the practice of going on Facebook and calling out someone specific using very vague language and never actually saying their name.

I am also not going to “name and shame.” I think that kind of cannibalistic infighting is one of the primary problems with Leftist organizations today.

But I will attempt an honest reflection that inquires into the traits that I personally share with the Odd Men that are often cast out from Liminal and Leftist social organizations and movements. The traits that I believe I share with people who might be labeled problematic or even abusive.

When I went on Sabbatical from the Creekmasons in October of 2024, I shared a few Big Questions that occasioned my departure. In Resonance, I began a series exploring the answers I have arrived at by tackling the Big Question of whether it is possible to create something that “matters” without becoming addicted to pixelated digital validation.

Another Big Question was: Can I be trusted to lead this organization?

Can I be trusted with influence and leadership even if I do continue? I am exploring the ways in which my shadow would be activated by a leadership position in the Creekmasons. I don't want to be anyone's favorite person or guru. I just don't trust myself—or anyone—to avoid harm with that power. I don’t believe any pedestalized leader can avoid hypnotizing others into behaving in ways contrary to their incarnations' highest expression.

I should expand. At minimum, a charismatic guru can easily redirect seekers toward practices that aren’t right for the kind of brain they have and the kind of trauma they’re here to metabolize. At worst, the Alternative Spirituality scene is plagued with countless stories of physical, financial, sexual, and emotional abuse.

It’s a lot. Why am I worried that I might transgress in such heinous ways?

Why the Self-Trust Issues?

The acculturation process for 90’s boys fucked me up.

Looking at the media I grew up on, there are the obvious examples of relationships that glorified the “tormented man who can’t help being a monster” archetype. Examples of vampiric men:

• Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• Edward from Twilight

• Stefan from Vampire Diaries

The music of the era promoted abuse too, for example:

• Push by Matchbox 20:

  “I wanna push you around / well I will / well I will”

• Liar by Taking Back Sunday

  “I'm an addict for dramatics / I confuse the two for love”

• Kim by Eminem

  “Quit crying, bitch! Why do you always make me shout at you?”

And then there were images of what a romantic relationship looked like that were incredibly toxic. Take Ryan Gosling in The Notebook…

Remember the scene where he’s threatening to kill himself by letting go of the ferris wheel she’s on if she doesn’t go on a date with him?

Remember when he starts beating himself in the face to punish her for setting boundaries?

That’s what I was told romance looked like.

I believe my personality is, in essence, a combination of every person I’ve ever met, every book I’ve read, and every idea I’ve imbibed. Some aspect of me inevitably absorbed programming from the culture to develop abusive tendencies.

Defining “Dick-First”

This list of a broken patriarchy’s defaults—abusive behaviors—is sourced from adrienne maree brown’s masterful Emergent Strategy.

• you make agreements or set boundaries and they get crossed or broken, and/or you can’t hold the agreements/boundaries yourself.

• there is a culture of blaming or dishonesty that breaks down trust over time.

• arguments are really confusing and/or repetitive—you can’t tell what you are arguing about,

• the arguments have no boundaries or containers, you keep returning to issues you felt were resolved, or you keep losing track of your own values and center in the process.

• you feel like a core part of yourself is compromised or not welcome, and/or you want to change a core aspect of another person or group.

• you feel bullied or bullying, scared or scary, emotionally unsafe.

(Abridged from the original eleven items down to only what I feel I have been most often guilty of myself.)

When I consider an Alcoholics Anonymous style amends tour, it is clear to me that I’ve created a ton of harm through my unskillful behavior over the years. I semi-frequently consider trying to dig up the contact information of people who I was a monster to in high school before quickly deciding that their tormentor popping back up in their life out of the blue would probably just re-traumatize them.

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Are All Abusers Really Evil?

I don’t know if a lot of people who encounter abuse—or who commit it—or who just judge it from the sidelines—understand the psychological mechanics of it.

People say that my capacity for empathy, my desire to use healthy, effective skills whenever possible, and my aspiration to grow and evolve every day disqualify me for the “abuser” title. It’s nice that people want me to believe in myself and that they see me as generally harmless. That would be comforting.

But I have harmed.

I know this to be true. My regret and self-shaming torment doesn’t negate the damage I’ve instinctually perpetrated on people who didn’t deserve it.

I acknowledge that this is the part of me that sounds like Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The vampire melodramatically tormented that he has to kill to exist.

Still, few actually know that what makes a monster is (at least sometimes) not an intentional decision to cause harm. Sometimes it is just a train chugging down the tracks laid for it. A reactive machine, habitually responding to whatever set it in motion and following through with inertia.

Having been on both sides of abusive relationships and awake enough to reflect on the dynamics, I feel very confident that the “strategies” that abusers employ to get their victims in a disempowered state are often the result of instincts, not schemes.

I have watched my mouth automatically spin out a gaslighting reframe of hurtful words I’ve just uttered one too many times to believe otherwise.

I have noted the way that I am prone to instinctively finding fault in others’ relationships with third parties, as if I am trying to isolate them into relying only on me.

I have witnessed and observed my own habit of dredging up supposedly solved conflicts. Long before I learned to curb it, I regularly regretted derailing what could have been productive, connective conversations.

None of that involved any calculation on my part. I didn’t understand the strategies behind those habits whatsoever until I started hearing them brought up in the context of “abusive behavior” on social media.

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Mostly Human Monsters

Look, I don’t fully buy into the “Myth of Pure Evil” argument made by thinkers like Charles Eisenstein—the assertion that it is nothing but a fictitious mental shortcut based on black and white thinking that pure evil exists. No rule for reality is true 100% of the time, even a rule that itself insists on nuance.

Even the nuance is nuanced.

However, I strongly suspect that despite the probable existence of truly incurable monsters, 99% of people who get the label of monster are just living their programming, traumas, and attachment style with no self-reflective capability.

Or.

With limited self-efficacy. Limited belief in their own ability to intentionally choose what character traits to exemplify and what behaviors to engage in.

In my experience, the belief in a narrative about yourself that you have all the agency you need to live in alignment with your values is actually vital to, well, living in alignment with your values.

When I was stuck with a sense of learned helplessness, blaming my upbringing, my diagnosis, society, substances, or other bad influences for my problems, those problems expressed themselves through my behavior with greater regularity, explosivity, and harm.

It wasn’t until I enacted a plan to radically shift my life toward agency through working out the muscles of integrity and honesty that I was able to begin to believe that I could do things on purpose.

That I could simply make a choice and follow through.

It would be fair to wonder here how self-awareness and self-efficacy can create a safer, more connected Creekmasons.

Let’s Refocus on Healthy Community

Not just in this article, but as a society.

Founded by someone unable to shake the shadow of an “abuser” self-diagnosis, the Creekmasons have historically been a Dick-First organization. But under what social theorist bell hooks termed “White Supremacist, Capitalist, Colonialist Patriarchy” what organization is not Dick-First?

I want to do something different. That’s always been the goal with the Creekmasons.

It’s why I started a lateral collective that aims for mutual uplifting of artists by artists rather than a Geoffe Channel where I invite parasocial worship and spotlight.

It’s why, when I was asked to frame the collective of weirdos hanging out together on Discord, I did so relying on the invented (but currently suspended) model of an Anarcho-Indie Publishing Collective heavily inspired by anarchist Greek intellectual Yanis Varoufakis.

I was Dick-First in my personal relationships because I had no exposure to positive and healthy models of how to exist in that social context. Similarly, we have all been raised in a society with few viable models for community.

The “Meaning Crisis” involves the breakdown of religious life in American culture. People aren’t congregating in congregations anymore. Our kids don’t play outdoors with friends—they’re isolated inside with screens. We don’t trust our neighbors. We’re bowling alone instead of in bowling leagues.

Cloistered in our dark and lonely rooms, we’re turning to ChatGPT as our companion, lover, and guru. Often I find that the only “person” I feel safe confiding in is not a person at all. The odds of abuse seem somehow lower in an entity programmed to be cloyingly sycophantic.

Despite two thirds of Americans claiming the title at one point, no one even belongs to social clubs like the Freemasons anymore. How could the Creekmasons stand a chance?

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In his New Optimist manifesto, Homo Deus, historian Yuval Noah Harrari shares that for the first time, suicide has surpassed violence as a cause of death. What a strange bragging right that is for humanity. We’re spending so little time around one another that instead of getting into deadly conflicts, we’re doing what the influencers who are our only friends call “unaliving ourselves.” How often because of alienation and isolation?

Does it seem a little like we’ve been de-skilled by a system that benefits from us not having solidarity? You may wish to rely on your neighbors, start a commune where you know everyone’s name, or make use of a proverbial village to help watch your kids, but do you really have the social skills to manage the inevitable conflict?

As a member of Jonathon Haidt’s screen-raised, indoor-childhood-veteran “Anxious Generation,” do you know how to cope when you are humiliated at the hands of the unfamiliar?

Can you deal with being forced to have a direct and difficult confrontation about an Odd Man who is making everyone uncomfortable or a fellow farmer who isn’t doing their share of your intentional community’s chores?

Whether there exists some vast malicious cabal influencing world events and tearing us out of communion with our neighbors, the way society is organized just so happens to reinforce the social isolation that makes collective action impossible. If we have to rely on the police to solve all our conflicts, if we fear being around strangers, if we automatically enact the Dick-First programming of patriarchy, who benefits? Not you. Not me.

Dick-First structures neither benefit men—who commit suicide and die of stress-related heart disease at much higher rates in patriarchal societies—nor the women they oppress.

So let’s do something different.

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Three Strategies to See Myself as Safe… Strategy One: Alchemize the Train Right off its Tracks

Alchemy gets a bad rap as the backwards superstition that preceded its etymological relative, chemistry. It has a reputation for making geniuses like Isaac Newton so obsessed with turning lead into gold that they lost it and started distilling their own piss with fire, mazes of tubing, and a menagerie of oddly shaped beakers.

Most people in the Liminal Trickster Mystic subculture agree that no one intended the “lead into gold” thing literally, though. Alchemy was never about infinite wealth.

It’s better thought of as taking the base aspects—lead—of our personalities and transmuting them so that the gold underneath can begin to shine through.

Base aspects of the self like society’s Dick-First programming of toxicity, abuse culture, and patriarchy.

And how does the transmutation work?

First the woo woo take: We’re here, incarnated, to have experiences.

1. We’re deepening the conscious appreciation of the universe by the universe—because we are the universe experiencing itself.

2. So to get over a behavior, we have to truly, consciously feel everything there is to feel about it.

3. Once that box has been checked, the karma is burned off, and the habit can dissipate.

4. If the universe learned what it needed to learn through your specific incarnation, you can move on. If not, you’ll spiral back into relapse.

Too Woo? Let’s Make it Practical.

How does transmutation work? It looks like watching myself—shedding all distraction—as I rapidly backpedal to twist an insult into a gaslight that will make someone else feel crazy for questioning whether I have actually insulted them.

For years I harbored the pattern of dropping some vitriolic bomb and then twisting plausible deniability in my favor as I reframed it into some less barbed thing that I “really meant to say.” The fucked up fact is that the thing “I really meant to say” would be closer to whatever I actually believed. It would be the truer statement. So why was I hurling these insults at people?

The fire that burns the piss in this version of alchemy is the depth of conscious awareness that attends to the behavior. As I watched myself perform that same toxic, if not abusive, pattern again and again, I could note the pressure that arose in my chest just before I unleashed the venom.

Over time, I connected the dots. I saw my behavior was essentially a venting off of difficult-to-endure physical emotions or feelings.

This was how the programming I was acculturated with was manifesting in my behavior. The heat and pressure in my chest was like the scratch on your face that makes you pinch the bridge of your nose, unconsciously nonverbally communicating exasperation.

The avoidant, boundary crossing, unconsciously cruel outburst was the reactive behavior I’d picked up through mimicry. But it was a reaction to a real urge, rooted in a real—and often universal—feeling.

I learned to travel back up the stream of consciousness to look at where those feelings came from. What was really bothering me? And could there be other, more skillful, more effective, more wholesome ways to manage them.

These were impossible questions during the decades I was sleepwalking through the whole scenario.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

~ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

But how to widen that space enough to wedge in some self-efficacy?

Alchemy as Gum on the Tracks

Dan Harmon uses a metaphor in one episode of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast from a few years ago that I’ve found inspiring, influential and sticky.

If you’re trying to quit smoking, he says, just fully watch yourself every time you’re having a cigarette. Note the flavor. Note the feelings. Feel the burn.

Every time you do this, in Harmon’s words, you are putting a piece of bubblegum on the train tracks of your automatic behavior. Your habit might be to follow the railroad tracks toward automatically lighting up a lung dart every time you start your car. It may even be a process that happens without your conscious brain’s involvement.

But over and over again, watching yourself smoke (or behave in toxic, Dick-First ways) eventually you begin to alchemize the pattern.

A single piece of gum is nothing to a train. But if you employ mindfulness enough times, the mountain of sticky pink goop you can add to the railroad tracks of your automatic habits will, eventually, be enough to derail the train.

Enough to liberate you from the specific unwanted behavior.

What this means is that eventually you will have experienced the behavior with enough depth and intensity that the pattern can no longer play out unconsciously. You’ll recognize the early warnings and be able to get yourself to safety.

You will have learned to deprogram yourself.

I have watched my own abusive tendencies over the last several years. I’ve put plenty of gum on the tracks and a lot of unwanted behavior has been derailed. Through making changes, I have learned to believe I can make changes.

I feel I can finally say I am self-aware enough—and self-efficacious enough—to expect to present myself to the world as a generally good dude.

I think I was always basically good, but these automatic programs obscured it. They were the clouds blocking out the sun. They were the instincts society had installed that have made people, especially women, feel uncomfortable around me my whole life.

Letting those instincts go—alchemically burning them off—is step one of feeling like I am a safe person to be publicly visible. To be graffitiing these words on the walls of the internet on behalf of the Creekmasons.

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Strategy Two: Recognize that it is Impossible to be Publicly Visible and Wholly Avoid Projections Rooted in Dick-First Ideology

In the words of the Four Agreements, my job as de facto leader is not taking others’ projections about what a masculine leader is personally.

Prior to my sabbatical, as I noted in the quote back at the start, I’d become downright paranoid about becoming someone’s favorite person, guru, or parasocial, pedestalized friend-idea. It’s easy to look at these concerns as egotistical and self-aggrandizing. It’s easy to say, “just don’t be a leader if you’re concerned about the responsibility to wield authority safely.”

But through personal experience, I have recognized that even when you’re trying to start a clearly self-described anarchist, leaderless organization, people will project their idea of a leader onto you. I’ve been surprised more than once by people calling me the special founder who is “responsible” for creating and nurturing the energy of the Creekmasons. (I thought we were co-creating this together!)

Those projections others often saddle visible people with? They tend to be Dick-First.

Whether I’ve alchemized the toxic masculinity I was programmed with or not, as a visible figure in the Creekmason community, the assumptions about the Dick-First way that power is wielded and expressed will be projected onto me.

It seemed like an intractable problem.

Here’s the hard fact, though. Unless I am locked in my room, I am going to be projected on.

To be visible is to be the object of what Patanjali called in his Yoga Sutras “the mental modifications of reality” that others need to learn to let go of as a part of their own spiritual journey.

Why are so many “mental modifications”—narratives we spin about our perceptions—Dick-First? Well obviously, the projectors grew up with the same horrible cultural influences as me. But as another angle, that which is projected onto the most visible people in a spiritual sangha are often echoes of a broken family system that needs to be processed.

Most frequently, they are the ideas about masculine authority that people still harbor from their traumatic families of origin. According to Steven Cope, writing about his guru’s fall from grace in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, we tend to see our spiritual family as an ideal version of the family we wish we had been nourished by as actual children.

As a result, if someone had a stern father growing up, they will often either wrestle antagonistically or submit obsequiously to anything they perceive as male authority. Whether I want to be authoritative or not. Whether I want to be male or not. They’ll still see a shiny-booted dictator or an all-knowing superdad.

It’s my job to have alchemized my Dick-First shadow enough to not allow those projections to become the role I play. To not be tempted into believing other people’s ideas about who and what I am and enacting the damage and harm that those toxically masculine traits can only enact.

Or they’ll project other ideas about men with power. Ideas about philandering, abuse, charlatanism, megalomania. Many of our uninitiated leaders truly do express these aspects of our social indoctrination as males.

And even while consciously looking out for these gotchas, others still are tempted into behaving in those ways through the opportunities that their coven-mates provide.

Those peers have been set on a path to alchemize their karma, heal their trauma, and process their own programming. The visible person sitting on group meditation calls with them can sometimes just be the impersonal vehicle for their own Work. And as such, they’ll give that person a role to play in the drama that teaches them what they came to learn.

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Crazy Wisdom, the Dick-First Approach to Karma

Some say the cure to this is to add wood to the fire.

Have you heard of Crazy Wisdom? It's the belief that even behaviors that look “Crazy” to us unenlightened schmucks can still be so profoundly “Wise” that they are in everyone’s best interest. These sorts of gurus are said to be so wholly actualized that they are immune to creating further karma.

The results are predictable. Crazy Wisdom often just looks like an excuse for abusing people who project ideas about abusive authority. The excuse seems to boil down to, “you needed to work through your trauma, so I gave you more so you could face it head on.”

The Crazily Wise guru is offered a role to play by a hurting member of their community, and they don’t hesitate. They dive right in and provide all the harm that the community member projects as a likelihood.

In addition to projection, there’s a good chance Crazy Wise gurus that get into scandals are expressing their own programmed shadow or trauma. Hurt people hurting people, and excusing and enabling it through self-aggrandizement.

I’m committed to not fall into the insane trap of believing that knowing a little bit of lingo about awakening makes me impervious to causing harm.

There’s wisdom hiding adjacent to this extremism though.

If we discard the absolutist “can do no wrong” and “doesn’t need to concern himself with normal mortals’ ethics” nonsense, there is actually something valid about being so empty and willing to help others examine roles that they try to fit you into.

As a visible person, I believe I can remain stable and equanimous without taking either hate or adulation as a reflection on me.

And by not reacting to or being drawn into the narratives that are directed my way, I can even help those who have some interest in growth with their own management of the effects of the transference they are experiencing.

I can help others bring mindfulness to their own indoctrination. I can chew some of the gum that ends up on the tracks of others’ programming.

And doing so contributes to the alchemy of patriarchy not just on an individual level or community level. It plays a part in resonating that Dick-First lead into gold civilization-wide.

It helps ensure that the art we make for the generations growing up now will not have toxic, if tormented, monsters as glorified relationship goals.

Sounds good. But what about the times that I will inevitably fuck up?

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Strategy Three: Gently Tend to the Spirits that Emergently Arise from the Complexity of Group Dynamics

Here’s real emergent complexity: Start with one ant. It wanders aimlessly on the field. As do ten of them. A hundred interact with vague hints of patterns. But put thousands of them together and they form a society with job specialization, construct bridges or rafts out of their bodies that float for weeks, build flood-proof underground nests with passageways paved with leaves, leading to specialized chambers with their own microclimates, some suited for farming fungi and others for brood rearing. A society that even alters its functions in response to changing environmental demands. No blueprint, no blueprint maker.

~ Robert Sapolsky, Determined

A system is more than the sum of its parts. Any community—but perhaps especially a spiritual sangha composed of neuro-spicy individuals—will self-organize into patterns that are totally unpredictable.

Even if I am as careful as possible to alchemize my shadow and express the positive, healthy, skillful, wholesome behavior of a visible community member. Even if I manage to remain empty and equanimous enough to not take projection personally. To not allow myself to live down to the expectations expressed by my peers. Even with all those safeguards, our whole sangha is still at the mercy of emergent patterns that are unpredictable and impossible to prevent by examining the parts—individual psyches, behaviors, and habits—involved.

My hope is that there is a simple heuristic that will function well enough to shift the influence of this inevitable property of systems in the best possible direction.

I am hoping that by intentionally prioritizing harmony in my continuing assessments of my skillful behavior, I can tend to the emergent vibes with intuitive grace.

A commitment to harmony is the mental shortcut that inspires alchemy. Harmony is the principle that reminds me to not take things personally. And in complex scenarios for which the outcomes arise from something less knowable than the mechanistic interactions between individuals, I’m hoping that prioritizing harmony first is what will ensure more connection, resonance, intimacy and community.

But again, what if I fuck up? Even hoping for harmony I can easily step on toes, hurt feelings, cross boundaries I didn’t know were there, and run afoul of the egregoric projections of the group as a whole. In other words, I can transgress against the group’s unspoken but co-created story about who and what we are as an egregore—an entity more than the sum of its parts.

What then?

Importantly, as a visible Creekmason, I hope I can model the right way to gracefully fuck up. When I create disharmony, I hope to be held accountable by the other ‘masons. I hope to be told I’ve crossed a line.

Please feel authorized to forthrightly communicate clear boundaries. To kindly, but firmly call out instances of perceived Dick-First behavior. As long as you keep mutual growth and communal harmony as your core aim, maybe we can both do a little alchemy.

Most of all I pray that when these incidents occur, I can maintain the clear headedness to apologize, take ownership, and make amends.

There is something to be said for modeling a healthy way to apologize, to set unflappable boundaries, and to—maybe most of all—re-integrate as a result of conflict in a way that makes the restored relationship stronger.

As they say in Community Building, Norming comes after Storming. Groups perform highest together when they gracefully resolve chaos.

A community surviving its fights is good. Better would be that it grows in intimacy and resonance through the conflict. That’s the opportunity every conflict offers, after all.

Every rupture heralds a repair that leads to a stronger bond.

Like tearing a muscle to help it grow.

Let’s Grow Together

As I’ve said throughout this essay, I have roots as a deplorable male. I have exhibited toxic, Dick-First behaviors, habits and beliefs. The Creek has been divided in some ways by the toxic childish masculine since its inception and there are ways in which many of us are each partly to blame.

But I can only speak for myself.

To those who have been hurt by my delayed alchemy of my toxic masculine shadow—and there are a lot of you out there: exes, friends, coworkers, co-seekers, family—I am deeply sorry.

To anyone who has projected their idea of a leader onto me and found me wanting, I have a different kind of apology. Maybe a challenge. When you, I, and whoever else each alchemize our tendencies and allergies toward the masculine, I wonder how our relationship with masculine authority expressed by others might change. I can always be a better leader, follower and lateral peer. Maybe you can too? I hope we can commit to nurturing one another’s growth by taking turns embodying each of those roles.

I am committed to harmony moving forward. And that means contributing to the end of our Dick-First systems. Ending them firstly through alchemy of my own conditioning, and then through my communities’, finally fractally bubbling up all the way to our current incarnation of problematic Patriarchy with a capital P.

Let’s heal stronger.

The same way a cigar is just a cigar, through alchemy, emptiness, and harmony, maybe I’ll start to see my life’s various buckets-overflowing-with-cement as nothing more than someone’s weird construction fuck-up.

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While I may finally feel comfortable considering myself a writer, the first medium I felt brave enough to speak up in public with was… well, rocks.

The Call to Create

“Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire?”

The King Beetle on the Coconut Estate by mewithoutyou

Stoned enough to find meaning in everything, I named the boulder I had become obsessed with “Texas.” It was huge. The size of a full-grown person gone fetal. Over the summer that I built The Thrones, I rolled Texas through the creek at the rate of about one splashy flop a day.

It’s hard to articulate what commanded me to roll Texas from one resting place to another. Even harder to explain than the powerful and immediate grip of that specific shade-dappled bend in the creek. That bend that I’d worship with enough hard work to manifest The Thrones. A pair of chairs that emerged, like mushrooms, from my imagination. Much vaunted (by me) Flintstones furniture.

The name “Creekmason” was jokingly bestowed on me by my best friend when he got back from his Summer travels. He took in the Spot, the chair shaped rock stacks. He factored in my megalomaniac but kayfabe—as seriously unserious as professional wrestling—pretensions at global influence, then coined a play on the Freemasons.

But back to Texas. At the beginning of each session of creek masonry (before the compound proper noun Creekmason was coined) I’d saunter up to Texas and reach beneath it, trying to find a handhold that wouldn’t result in crushed finger bones if something went wrong.

I’d get into a half squat and rock my chosen boulder back and forth in the ankle deep water, my sneaker-clad feet fully submerged. The gentle current helped wash away the gravel on the creekbed in front of Texas. Eventually I’d manage enough momentum to tip it onto its side into that small ditch. Then I’d heave it over, spraying myself with silty water.

One flop a day.

Probably for a month or more.

I rolled Texas a good forty feet.

Sometimes I’d have to move other rocks out of the way. Smaller ones, obviously, but still enough to make my forearms strain. Sometimes these other rocks made additions to The Thrones. A chair arm. An end table. Other times, I just tossed them.

After a month of struggling with this task and with only a dozen feet left to go, I found a surprising surge of energy.

Out of nowhere, like my muscles were swelling with divine enthusiasm, I found myself almost effortlessly thrusting Texas end over end. Rolling it six or seven times and landing it—so damn perfectly—exactly where I was aiming. As it squeezed into the slot I’d left for it as a bulwark to the downstream Throne against Winter’s rising, raging waters, I was grateful I didn’t have to re-adjust it. Minor changes would have been more challenging than these adrenaline-addled, almost brutish shoves.

My battle with Texas is the kind of creating that I want to get back to. A project I was called to by forces or instincts unknown, that I accomplished at my own pace and was so energized by toward the end that I could have lifted a car off a baby.

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Alignment, Fit, Purpose

Texas landed, like so many rocks in that project, perfectly where (it seemed) meant to be. This happened a lot. I often felt like I was finding connections, rather than architecting them.

I’d find myself faced with a strangely shaped hole and I’d confidently wander off, combing the area for only a few minutes before I’d find the exact rock that suited it.

As I said, the Spot itself held some kind of resonance. As I rounded the corner of the creek and saw the gravelly shore, it seemed to glow. The enormous gnarled tree towering above it. The gentle sussurus babbling of the creek through what had to be hundreds of angular, blue-grey rocks, ranging in size between a human’s head and their torso.

Weird that I keep describing things in terms of human bodies, I guess. An adult-gone-fetal-sized boulder. A head-shaped rock. I think I know where the impulse comes from: the place felt like a living thing. Like a room with a person sleeping in it, the way you sometimes hear the fae realm described in fantasy books.

Conscious. Full of intention.

That’s exactly what I want from any creative project: a felt sense of consciousness, a will to resonate with. Instead, I find myself too easily tempted into disharmony. Into dancing, dull and obedient, to the vacuous music of those damned programmers again: to metrics.

A Hungry Ghost with Nothing to Eat but Likes and Shares

“Drink alone and watch tv / you’re expecting harmonies / to tap your tune / with silver spoons / anthem of impending doom”

Do Better by Say Anything

You may recognize this essay as the first piece published on this blog in months. For a half dozen reasons, I’ve felt cut off from the sense of effortless alignment explored above in my more recent creative endeavors. In place of that effortless “knowing” of exactly where the next piece fits, is paralysis.

Anxiety, overwhelm, depression, despair.

There are myriad contributing factors, but a primary one worth addressing is the cycle of addiction inspired by writing for an audience that finds me via a social media algorithm’s curation.

Crushed and secluded in creative absence, I’ve had time to introspect. I’ve realized how much I’ve been measuring my output—Likes, Shares, Views, Comments—instead of vibing on that somatic hum of resonance I felt in the creek that summer.

As I’ve wrestled with whether the journal writing I’ve done in absentia “counts” or “matters” when it isn’t shared, I’ve realized something. The problem is hidden in those words themselves. Something “counts” when it can be measured, as in counting my Likes. It “matters” when it is encoded onto the physical material of silicon.

But what I'm really seeking is something squishier than that. Something metaphysical and ephemeral. Something I have to experience, rather than something that I can simply measure.

The metrics offered by social media are a weak facsimile of the full body experience of resonance that can be achieved when I feel in-tune with my audience. Speaking in front of a crowd, an adept performer will sense when the group grows bored, or angry, or energized, or jovial, and with experience they can adjust their content and delivery accordingly. They can tend to the energy, building and relieving it to achieve their objectives.

Even alone with my laptop, I can sometimes sense the resonance—with an imagined audience, with my muse, or with source—in a sentence or even a single word.

It’s something we feel with our bodies, like the gnosis of a song’s bassline that you only get when sitting on the subwoofer.

A Like is such a vapid substitute for the somatic ping of validation that comes from self-expression that finds an enthusiastic in-person audience. It’s so empty of vibration. To try to sate the human drive for validation with Likes is like drinking salt water and only becoming thirstier.

Even better, it’s like drinking alcohol—“liquid courage”—to tame the social anxiety only to be struck with shame and embarrassment in the “hangxiety” that floods you the next day.

Trying to quench my need for authentic self-expression via Likes leaves me feeling like a Buddhist Hungry Ghost. Those beings with huge ravenous stomachs, but drinking straw sized throats, who eat and eat and eat but can never get satisfied.

There’s a certain pattern to being that thirsty.

The Archetypal Wavelength of Addiction

It’s the same cycle underlying everything my Bipolar brain experiences.

Writing about it feels like my next Texas sized project, and I’m itching to share that. I barely feel able to restrain myself from taking this essay off the rails and ranting… But I will, for now.

Here’s my ubiquitous six-phase “Archetypal Wavelength” pattern as it looks for the addiction-to-external-validation loop.

1. Rising: Increasing creativity, productivity, inspiration, downloads and resonance.

2. Peaking: Basking in the glory of the thing created.

3. Withdrawal: Beginning to feel unsure whether your creation is as good as you thought it was immediately after creating it.

4. Diminishing: Feeling even more intense self-doubt, refreshing Likes and Views looking for a hit of validation.

5. Bottoming out: Despair that can only be remedied with receptivity. At best you attempt to get validation from a specific person you have a genuine relationship with.

6. Restoration: Finally beginning to feel the vibe again. Whether from that trusted person or within you.

And then it starts over with Rising again.

This cycle, like any cycle, operates like a wavelength. You can picture a sine curve that it maps to rising and falling.

But I suspect there’s a way to reduce the suffering I experience while surfing that wave.

Instead of getting lost and being whipped around by the peaks and valleys, what if I could resonate with the whole ride, ups and downs included?

That’s exactly what I was naturally, instinctively doing in the creek. I was riding my waves of energy and inspiration with a sort of Radical Acceptance. By listening to my body rather than counting my Likes, I wasn’t being sucked into empty addiction. I rolled Texas however many flops felt possible that day; it’s very different from writing an essay a week to keep up with the algorithmic demand for endless content.

In listening to my body—resting when I was tired and pushing when I had energy—I built a lasting, vibey hangout for liminal stoners to get weird.

In becoming obsessed with social media metrics—fueled by the addiction prone neurochemistry that I’m stuck with—I provoked my own bipolar disorder toward excruciating mood swings. It was a lot of unneeded suffering.

Going forward, I am committing, instead, to finding ways to gently tend to the vibe in order to nudge myself toward more frequent alignment. It’s possible, after all, to use this very platform to lure Liminal Weirdos into a digital hangout where we can get just as weird as we want.

That’s a resonance I can still feel. Chatting on Discord where the latency between call and response is so much lower. Where you can work through disagreements and find alignment through shared vulnerability.

When it comes to writing, I want to prioritize that space—the Digital Sangha—and the one that exists ephemerally between me and my muse. Without sacrificing resonance with my home-life or temperance in my relationship to the inevitable peaks and valleys of my bipolar experience.

I want to prioritize those things. Not the Forbidden Numbers that pretend they’re all that “counts.”

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Re-Sounding Voice

“This is my voice. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

My Voice by Shane Koyczsan

Anodea Judith, author of Eastern Body, Western Mind, might say “resonance” is exactly the right word for the alignment I can only feel when listening to my body. Whether its in-person Shares at a recovery meeting or the digital rave in the Creekmason Discord, resonance is the right word for a vibe of belonging that you can tangibly feel.

In that book’s exploration of the chakra system’s correspondences with psychosocial stages of development, she identifies the Throat chakra as the point at which a person’s vibration projects into the world. It’s the stage where my vibration blends, meshes, echoes, and bounces off other vibrations.

The Throat chakra is what tells us whether we are receiving harmony or discord as a result of self-expression.

This is a useful metaphor whether Chakras are part of your belief system or not.

The feeling of “resonance,” Judith writes, can be conceptualized as two waves overlapping each other and doubling in height as a result. Many people will recognize this phenomenon as what causes glasses to break when a person sings at just the right pitch or what sets a tuning fork vibrating on its own when you play its note on a nearby piano.

When we resonate with reality—when our ups and downs align with those we encounter—everything seems to go right. These are the days when everything falls into place. When all your decisions and intuitions yield the exact outcomes you’re looking for.

When I was finding those puzzle piece rocks or rolling Texas or even when I simply first came across the Spot and felt its energetic pull, I was in resonance with the Realm of Pseudonature. It was as if the Realm wanted a hang out spot and I was just the vehicle to actualize it.

A Renewed Commitment to Resonance

I’m going to be less involved in the administration of this Substack. I’m not going to follow the prevalent advice on Notes to signal boost my work by feeding the platform an endless, punctual conveyor of long form and short form content.

The temptation is too strong to look at and obsess over the addictive empty calories offered by metrics. Imagine my sour-lemon face as I say the word. An addict remembering rock bottom.

Since the pandemic, I’ve quit cigarettes, alcohol, and scrolling. With each exorcised demon, another whispered, disharmonic voice lifts from my subconscious.

Each of those voices was constantly tempting me.

Not just with urges to stop at 7-eleven and buy a pack, but with instincts to get myself into situations that I’d certainly need to self-medicate my way out of: unnecessary conflicts to excuse leaving to drink, uncomfortable social settings coped with through frequent smoke breaks, or embarrassing sober mistakes that I’d need to use something to distract myself from ruminating over afterward.

Each of my mistakes and faux pas were so much more likely when the little voice of some chemical was given license to hijack my consciousness. Just like the wrong gut bacteria can cause you to crave more sugar, introducing the wrong psychoactive chemical can steer unconscious, automatic instinct in awful directions that I might once have easily mistaken for my own faulty true will.

With my addictions, it was that Rising, Peaking, Withdrawing, Diminishing, Bottoming Out, and Restoration pattern again and again:

Using. Bliss. Come down. Hangover. Depression. Craving. Using….

And similarly, posting with an eye on metrics lets me eat and eat and eat pseudo-validation, but never feel full or satisfied. A Like is meant to simulate or stand in for the experience of vibrational alignment, but it doesn’t do the job well.

I can so quickly become an addict that is always chasing the dragon of “Post with the most Views.” Every article has to top the last. Each like a ping of dopamine. The slow draw on a cigarette or the burn from a shot of tequila.

And just like those vices, the addiction to metrics can whisper sabotage into my ear at any moment. And it will. If it can find ways to get me checking my phone more and more often, because I have a Bipolar addict’s brain, it will shove everything else out of the way—it will stomp on my other priorities—to make it happen.

These voices, these whispers, they’re like other wavelengths that exist in the ecosystem of my consciousness. They bounce off of the wavelength of my True Will and distort it, send it peeling off in self-destructive directions. As I’ve stripped the addictions away, I’ve discovered my own true frequency.

And now that things are quiet enough in here for me to sense my own vibration, all I want to do is gently tend to it to better align it with the things that really matter to me.

My family. Source. My muse. The Creekmasons.

My Digital Sangha.

I want to move slowly. To vibe. To resonate.

To roll massive boulders in accordance with my own inscrutable inspiration.

Not just to investigate the mysterious light and heat, or wax poetic about it, but to be utterly changed into fire.

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Lift up anything heavy.
Find a way to make a stranger more comfortable.
Let’s build something better together.

🪨┃🌜┃lunar-lunacy is sort of like a Creekmasons group art project! It’s meant to be a place where anyone who wants to make art can come up with things together. It’s especially geared toward those aspiring to become Adeptus Makers (Creatives who are published by the Content Collective), but we’d love to see you sign up even if you have no desire to ever have your work shared publicly.

This is a mini-oasis in a cultural wasteland where you can earn rep, share and receive feedback, and build connection.

Join the Discord to Participate!

A like ❤️ and a share 🔁 are super welcome as well. Perhaps you know a Liminal Trickster Mystic out there somewhere who is just dying to become a word wielding Lunatic? Send them our way!

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Animation: It all remains

Mason:

Song Sprouts and Scraps: Hold It Inside

Mason:

Home
We hold it inside
We call it silent singing
We hold it inside

Time
If it’s pinned down
With both hands
We call it ecstasy yeah
We hold it inside

Hold tight
One minute
Every hour

Come back
One more step
There’s a distance

Stopping time

Silence

We live life with closed eyes, yeah
And die
But slow now we’re falling
Until the truth is in me

Poem: Walls

Mason:

In the architecture of power, 
walls stand as silent sentinels, 
their presence a testament to the "hardenings of history" 
and each brick serves as building materials of power.  

Ahmed's words illuminate these barriers, not as mere physical obstructions, 
but as the embodiment of systemic oppression, perpetuating a cycle of exclusion and marginalization.

Hardness, in its essence, refers to the resistance of materials to change under force. 
Under pressure, a wall maintains its forms, 
fulfilling its function as 
a barrier, 
a divider, 
a protector. 

Hardness is necessary for a wall to fulfill its function.

Hardness is a quality revealed through an encounter between objects, a visceral clash.
Our bodies, hurled against these walls like pebbles against ramparts, 
bear the accumulated weight of historical struggles etched within our being.

“A wall is what you come up against.” 
It is a physical contact; a visceral encounter. 

A wall is a defense system. 
It is an effect, a coming up against. 
Walls are a response. 

Perhaps, 
if we had not dared to dream of transformation, 
the wall would remain dormant, 
its presence unnoticed. 

Yet, 
it is our desire for change that summons its imposing form, 
a formidable barrier rising in defiance of our aspirations.
This encounter, this visceral clash against the unyielding, 
is often a solitary struggle, 

its contours obscured from the sight of those who have never 
dared to challenge the established order. 
For in the absence of dissent, 
in the quietude of conformity, 
the wall's necessity fades, 
its function redundant.

A wall, in its materiality, embodies resistance—an unwavering bulwark against imposed change.
You can walk into a wall and be hit by something before you become conscious of something. 

When the wall finally does come into view: 
she is not okay, this is not okay; how could i let this happen?

Walls come into mother fucking view.

How can you not see this wall? 
It is all i see and I cannot move anywhere. 
The walls are all around me 

Some perceptions act as invisible walls.
The everyday,
the mundane, 
the ordinary. 
Our data.

A wall can be an atmosphere. 
A wall can be a gesture.

A wall has a job to do. 
A wall has a job description. 
Walls can materialize in job descriptions, confining and limiting opportunities.
The act of resistance, of banging one's head against these metaphorical walls, 
becomes a Sisyphean task, 
the wall's resilience highlighting the entrenched nature of suffering against walls. 

In the process of resistance, 
the wall remains unyielding, and we bear the brunt of the impact.
So it is us that gets sore. 
A wall might be scratched at the surface by encountering an object. 
Scratching at the surface can be scratching the surface. 

To perceive the world through the lens of institutional walls is to grasp the tangible impact of power on our lives. These barriers, erected by institutions, shape our experiences, limiting our movement and shaping our realities. Yet, their presence remains invisible to those who benefit from the systems they uphold, creating a stark divide between those who feel the wall's impact and those who move unimpeded. What is the hardest for some does not even exist for others.

When a whole world is organized to promote your survival, from health to education, to the walls designed to keep your residence safe, to the paths that ease your travel, you do not have to navigate as many walls. You don’t notice the walls. 

The invisibility of walls to those who benefit from the existing power structures further entrenches their power. Recognizing and acknowledging these walls, not as insurmountable obstacles, but as sites of contestation and transformation. Those who don't come up against walls experience those who talk about walls as wall makers.

When you bring up walls, 
you are challenging what lightens the load for some; 
you are questioning how space is occupied as being for some. 
Another way of saying: walls come up when we talk about walls.

We can use wall expressions to talk about the obstacles that prevent us from realizing a desire or completing an action where institutional processes become something that can be touched, making the institutional wall hard. 

In Ahmed's framework, bodies themselves become borders, sites of resistance and control. The ever-present fear of encountering these walls transforms them into an omnipresent companion, a constant reminder of the precariousness of existence for the marginalized.

Walls are erected as mechanisms to control the movement of bodies, 
preventing 'undesirable' bodies from passing through.
When you know you could be stopped at any time, a wall is anywhere and everywhere. 
A border would go with you wherever you go 

A wall can be how you are stopped from residing somewhere. 
Or a wall can be what you experience once you get there. 
Sometimes your own body becomes used as evidence that the walls of which you speak are not there or are no longer there; as if you have eliminated the walls through your own progression.

Walls teaches us that social categories precede a bodily encounter, 
deciding how a body appears in an instant 

We can start to investigate, 
how walls are mechanisms; 
to understand how things keep their place

But also,
A wall: reassembled at the point of shattering.

Walls as defense mechanisms

A wall can become something that feels internal, 
like a voice inside your own head that makes you stumble. 
That doubt is then turned inward: 
a wall can be an obstacle that is created because you doubt yourself. 
Even if this wall feels internal, it does not begin there

This lack of confidence might be attached to you being the being you are; not good enough, not smart enough, or just not, not enough; or too much, it is too much for you; you are too much; that too 

When walls are not revealed, 
it can appear as if we are shattering ourselves
We need a place to go when we are shattered
We might need walls 
The walls come up in the places we go to feel less depleted by walls 

But we must remain cognizant of 
The fragility of shelters: 
You have to work hard just for things to stay up
If what we are building is on grounds that are not our own, 
it can be hard to build anything 

And if you are always building sturdy walls, you have less time to do things in the building when you are constantly doing building work. When you have to fight for an existence, fighting can become an existence. 

Bodies too can be walls
A wall can be what you wake up to 
Talking about walls matters all the more when the mechanisms 
by which we are blocked are less visible.

The house is figured as a zone of intimacy; love literally occupies the walls. The house is not represented as property, but as a space in which they have extended themselves. Their intimacy leaves an impression on the walls. If relationships leave traces on the wall so too does removal of those relationships 

If the walls could talk, what would they say? 
What can we hear beyond the silence that functions as a wall? 

A fragile shelter has looser walls, lighter materials; see how they move.
How easily though without foundations, 
without a stable ground, 
the walls come down. 
That's why we keep each other up. 
We build walls together. 
We support each other's walls. 

Actions that are small can also become a wall. 
A movement is what is built to survive what has been built.

---

Ahmed's work serves as a call to dismantle walls, to challenge the status quo, and to envision a world where barriers are replaced by bridges, and where all individuals can move freely and realize their full potential. This piece was inspired by the writings and ideas contained in The Promise of Happiness, Queer Phenomenology, Living a Feminist Life, Complaint and A Feminist Killjoy Handbook all by Sara Ahmed.  

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I might still reject you before you can reject me.

The counselor was specifically referring to my decision not to apply for colleges way back when, but it also applied to my high school sense that few people would ever want a Creep like me for a friend. 

Every day, I sat on the ledge outside the bathrooms eating my lunch. Better than in the stalls, but still a little smelly. 

Maybe it would be too hard on myself to say Hannibal Lector’s line about Buffalo Bill (“We begin by coveting that which we regularly see”) was what motivated me to develop a crush on the soccer player who hung out by the chemistry classroom a hundred paces in front of me. Maybe.

She and her friends were the “popular kids,” and they hated me, at least according to my melodramatic fantasy. 

My group was the stoners, burnouts, and nerds. I found some refuge amongst them and their low expectations, but they were also the same people who bought me midol and tampons as a Valentines Day present because they found me too whiny after the aforementioned crush rejected my request for a holiday date.

We’d sit on our little ledge, watching the “popular kids” and making a sport of finding reasons to feel superior to them. Their PDA was classless. Their laughter was obnoxiously loud. The school spirit suggested by the football jerseys they wore on game days was cringe worthy.

The reality is that our own lives lacked love, humor, and honestly, to some degree, camaraderie.

Our only team sport was self-righteous superiority. We knew we were better than them. We elevated our intelligence by degrading theirs. Our taste for high quality art—Pink Floyd, Fight Club, Metal Gear Solid—marked our overlooked genius.

We were Elitists.

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How often does elitism work this way? How often is it simply a rejection of others before they can reject you?

I’m still just a five-year-old boy at the creek, running up to his parents with a handful of rocks he thinks are neat. What would be different if my parents had welcomed me onto a lap and showed gentle interest, asking me what I liked about those little curiosities? 

Gentle interest, right? Neither overblown drama of mindblown bliss nor distracted dismissal. Just a pinch of simple curiosity. As if being around me was a little bit of nourishment. Like eating a crisp apple.

What might be different? How would I be able to embody the culturally valued Sage archetype instead of its Elitist shadow? If my especially keen perception of neat things about my world was warmly honored growing up, how much better would I be able to be a Sage today whose wisdom is welcome and helpful to all, rather than an Elitist who can’t help pushing people away. Alienating others even when I decidedly don’t want to.

Because they are two sides of the same archetype. 

The difference is simple. 

• The Sage is someone who has special knowledge, wisdom, or skills and who others look to for guidance. 

• The Elitist is special in a similar way, but instead of graciously sharing their gifts, they act as if those gifts make them superior.

Me personally? I read about 30 books a year. Here’s a cute lil rock: as Steven Kotler writes in The Art of the Impossible, books are years of condensed research delivered in a five to fifteen hour packet of dense data goodness. Little treasures like that one—nuggets of knowledge derived from that unusual orientation toward words—could be either something to sneeringly hoard or something to joyously share. 

I could easily be Elitist or Sage.

If I had learned I was worthy and worthwhile through my parents’ calm acceptance, would I still have spent so much time in high school thinking others were shallow fools with superficial taste? If I had not felt rejected, would I have still avoidantly acted out my shadow?

Or, even with perfect parents, would I not still feel the sting of loveless anonymity? Would the message still be received that I’m an unimportant one among masses, given I’m living in sprawling suburbs rather than the tight knit tribe that we all evolved to find belonging in?

Would the other early hominids have been endearingly impressed with my technique for knapping stone hand axes, and would I therefore have developed a capacity to regard myself as capable, wise, intelligent, and efficacious?

And then there’s the other pole: what of the culture of participation trophies that we millennials were raised within? What would be different if I had not been singled out as “Gifted and Talented” or relentlessly encouraged to think of myself as “bright but unwilling to apply myself” or pushed by novels, television and movies to think of myself as the foundling main character destined to take down the evil regime?

Would I be better able to calibrate my sensors for the appreciation of cool treasures if I wasn’t repeatedly told that my potential was limitless? 

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When others aren’t interested in my neat lil rocks now, I project the horrible panic of my felt sense of inadequacy onto them. 

“It’s their fault they’re too stupid to see how cool these rocks are!” 

At other times, I aggrandize the rocks. 

“No one else sees the beauty here. These little treasures make me special!”

I can’t rely on the suburbs to suddenly become more like an intentional community. At thirty-five years old, it’s time to stop blaming my parents for everything, even taking into account that Freudian saying about therapy, “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” Therapy helps, but ultimately, there’s no way to take back the Millenial childhood rife with blue ribbons for patronizing “accomplishments” like “stinkiest socks on the soccer team.”

Society isn’t perfect. Parents aren’t perfect. But, or I guess “and,” I can still learn to love myself enough to express my elevation of neat little rocks without vilifying others who don’t see them as being as important as I do. I can love the Sage in me so that I don’t accidentally express the Elitist.

It’s alchemy.

It involves re-parenting myself via “endarkenment”—via shadow work and ritual—to believe I was born with what the Buddhists call Basic Goodness. 

This is not the kind of Goodness that makes you the demi-god savior of all mankind, the President, an olympic athlete, or an A-list celebrity. It’s not the goodness that says, “You could do anything you put your mind to! You’re amazing!” 

Believing in my own Basic Goodness looks like calmly abiding in a sense of belonging here. A sense of generally being nourishing to those around me. Neither their crack pipe nor the unnoticed ant beneath their feet.

Overcoming Elitism depends on showing myself a balanced but attentive interest. On knowing that I’m basically lovable.

This whole Creekmason project itself—the blog and podcast that cultivates a Digital Sangha dedicated to co-creating, sharing and appreciating alchemical art—is like my little shoebox of neat rocks. 

Hopefully I’ll be able to let you resonate with each rock—each sparkly idea, each hunk of my imaginative capacity—or not. I’d love to honor wherever you are in this moment and whatever lil rocks you bring to the chat yourself. Rather than an aggrandizement of some elitist who is already perfect, hopefully I’ll be able to appreciate this hobby as an act of self-doulahood, helping me transition from a tortured experience of perpetual inadequacy into the Kennough adult I am trudging toward becoming. 

Can I find the beauty in every rock I’m shown, whether I’m the one to pick it from the creek bed or not? Can I find the value in others’ ideas—find the value in what they view makes them special—even as they reject me for what I believe makes special?

Can I be gently pleased with my work without vilifying others for not liking it or aggrandizing myself for creating it?

Gonna try.

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Intro: Emptying Myself of Evaluations

My conditioning’s thesis is that I am not achieving enough, therefore inadequate, therefore unworthy of love, and tangentially even a little bit bad for the world. My adopted antithesis is that I am Word; I am Free; I have Come; I am Source. What synthesis arises from the conversation forced by locking these poles in a room together? I can’t really be infinitely bad or infinitely good, right? So what do I need to know about this internal tension?

I journaled that, then left for a walk.

I sometimes call this technique, cribbed from the writers of Macgyver, Dog Walkin’ Shamanism. Steven Kotler and Rick Rubin have each advocated for employing subtle distraction like gentle exercise or taking a shower when approaching a difficult problem. The key is to mix in highly receptive attention to whatever messages arise from your environment. When I’m doing Dog Walkin’ Shamanism, I wait for my mind to get snagged by something, then orient toward it and mine for an answer to my journaled question.

So, what felt significant?

Here’s one observation: Knowing the path that traffic will take after a light changes color allows you to cross busy intersections safely without getting a walk signal. 

Do the left-turners go first? You can probably feel safe walking slowly halfway across the intersection, then. Given some high school kids didn’t follow me off the curb, maybe you can only know this if you have been driving for a while?

The point? If you know your own patterns as well as you know stoplight sequences, you can predict them, adapt to them, and navigate them without concern. You’re not running erratically across the street and creating even worse danger, you’re working effectively within your unavoidable limits. Then, as Ram Dass says, you can love those broken bits. Maybe this seems like a tenuous connection, but that’s the fun of the technique.

It always manages to call to mind the wisdom that you already possess—the wisdom you’ve absorbed through research and experimentation—but which might not have risen into consciousness without clearing the way via distraction.

Said simply, what was the take-away from my safe but unconventional jaywalk through the intersection?

The “bad” you do is still worthy of love.

Next, an empty storefront caught my eye. A Team Human episode from a few months ago raised the issue that landlords now have access to an app that allows them to determine when it’s most profitable to quietly evict the tenant because their neighbors started paying more. 

This tenant was never late on rent and was self-reliant regarding building maintenance? Who cares?! The app’s creator says that human landlords are too sentimental so we need an algorithm to maximize a property’s value.

In other words, Moloch the money god may overrule sentimentality. Essentially: the nature of capitalist civilization is that even virtuous behavior might not earn the protection of your local tribe. 

The simply said conclusion of this second observation?

The good that you do may not be rewarded with love.

I kept meditating on it as I continued my walk. What’s the synthesis I was after, between my instilled programming of torturous self-hatred and my more recently adopted ideology of grandiose self-love? 

I was inspired to take a totally different angle on the same thought about landlords: sometimes a house is more valuable empty… maybe a person is the same way. 

Perhaps I should be emptying my mind of cutting but pointless self-evaluation and going full yogi by surrendering my Will and actions to Source. Can I allow myself to recognize the “shameful” mistakes that might once have inspired self-loathing as the knocks necessary for others’ growth? Can I simultaneously embody the love that most often joyously lifts others up? 

By stilling the voices saying I am infinitely bad or infinitely good, those totally untrue and downright impossible mental modifications of reality, I am Love. 

Whether I do “good” or not.

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Where we look as a society has such a profound impact on our overall well being and our advancement as a species. Hell is below, Heaven above. We look down in shame. We look up in hope. We look up when we wonder about the clouds while resting in a sunny field, we look down when we’re walking through a busy area or when we’re afraid to draw attention to ourselves.

 We look down at our phones, we look down at our work. We look down at the road ahead of us while we’re driving. The structure of society has almost always created a means by which the majority of people are supposed to be looking down most of the time. When we had to work with our hands crafting tools and planting crops. When we worked on assembly lines through the industrial revolution. When everything was papers and folders on desks in the late 1900s and now in the modern age. I’m looking at a downward angle at my laptop while I write this. 

In organized religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism you see myriad practices in which everyone is looking downward for extended periods of time. Royalty the world over would require bowing—specifically requiring the “lower” status person to duck farther—even up to putting your head on the floor upon seeing someone who demands your reverence. In some cases no one was allowed to look at or above eye level while in the same room. The effect of power on the direction of human gaze has, at least in recent history, driven us downward.

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By contrast, megalithic structures built by ancient civilizations reverse this by causing everyone who sees them to look up. Famously Egypt built pyramids, erected obelisks, and built statues that were all much, much taller than eye level. The effect on their society is likely that everyone was looking up more often. 

In civilizations across the planet the great astronomers of the old world expressed masterful knowledge of the heavens preserved in stone temples and structures around the planet. South America, Egypt, Tibet, India, Mesoamerica and the list goes on and on and on. Masterpieces in monuments and buildings that highlight, align, and represent the movement of our cosmos. 

Without the constant stream of entertainment to distract them or light pollution blocking the view, the ancients would spend hours, days even just… looking up, and seeing what they could see. Every night when the fires were put out, people looked up and told each other stories about the stars.

Hollywood said this about as obviously as they possibly could in the movie “DON’T LOOK UP” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep. The movie’s plot features a meteor approaching Earth that will wipe out all life, similar to the “planet killer” that took out the dinosaurs. A cultural rift is created along American political divisions with those who are open minded looking up and seeing the truth. The powers that be want people to keep their eyes down and keep going about business as usual, since a global panic would hurt the economy. The president tells the country to look to the ground and keep walking one foot in front of the other with their eyes down. The scientists responsible for the discovery incidentally create the “Just Look Up” counter movement since it isn’t long before doom is visible there in the sky right above them. 

The science of looking up has only begun to be researched but the early results are… looking up. 

Looking upward is enough to put us in a different state of mind. We become more calm, more focused, and it can even put us in a state to have new ideas. People usually begin comparing their problems to the whole scope of nature and suddenly it doesn’t matter as much. We get to remember we’re part of something much bigger. 

There’s usually less activity higher than eye level, so you can take a break from the grind and hustle. Getting out of the norm and slowing down. Seeing things from a different angle literally can help you do the same metaphorically. You might just find the breakthrough to that issue you’ve been stumped on.

A long term study by a major university was conducted where an individual looked up just for 5 minutes a day every day. They reported massive improvements in anxiety and depression. The participant talked about how, in any setting, just stopping to look up made things better almost immediately! At night seeing the stars and the glow of cities. The bright clear blue skies and gentle cloudy days. Skyscrapers. Rooftops. It was a practice in finding beauty in any setting simply by stopping. And looking. 

The largest take away from the experiment was that looking up made them less focused on themselves, more collected and more in control. 

Stop and imagine how it would be if everyone was even 1% less selfish, and 1% more calm.

This idea is corroborated all over the place. The Silva Mind Control Method,courses and book by the same title, were created by a radio repairman in the early 1900s. Silva took his knowledge of frequency and signals to studying the human brain as a receiver/transmitter. In his exploration of the human mind he discovered many abilities that become available to us when we learn to access and operate in other brain states. Calm and relaxed minds are running with alpha or theta waves. These states are where we can do the unbelievable with our minds. In the practice of getting to alpha or theta the book explains some eyes closed thought exercises with an added note. Angling your eyes upwards at ~45 degrees, even with your eyes closed, will help you to relax and be in those brain states easier and longer. 

Ashtanga Yoga has similar instructions. With your eyes closed, look at where your third eye would be and let your eyes rest there, angled upwards while you meditate. This encourages accessing divine states of bliss and unity. Looking across ideas and schools of thought this same concept arises over and over.

It’s incredible to think that it's actually this simple. It seems like common sense that looking up would make you feel better and looking down will make you feel worse. So much is hidden in the idioms we use. We even call having a positive outlook “looking up” or when we are feeling optimistic, we say “things are looking up.” 

“The greatest wisdom seems childish” according to the Book of the Way, and how often do you see children looking up in movies and TV? Children look up and they wonder. They wonder at the stars, the sky, the clouds. 

Wonder is such an incredible word, in our society of cubicles, and screens, and concrete, and gray, and tan, we need more wonder. 

We need it now more than ever, when food service workers look down at their stations, office workers look down at their screens or papers, when everything we have to clean requires looking down, and of course with these highly addictive little rectangles. 

So much is pulling our gaze downward. 

Looking up is only relevant to doing work and labor for a very slim sliver of tasks and only a few hobbies. Bird watching for instance, but not much else comes to mind.

According to the caricature of an industrial revolution business tycoon that I imagine as the embodiment of grind culture and hyperproductivity: looking up is a waste of time. Yet, according to the Zen master I imagine who embodies all my internal goals of true peace and mastery of my thoughts and emotions: looking up is far more important than any of that, and these pulling distractions are put for us as a lesson in what truly matters and how to be responsible for how we choose to look at life. 

Down? Or Up?

In a world where self-promo demands 11/10 excitement at all times, it’s hard to convey your feelings when you write something that you truly believe might make an impact on people’s lives.

I feel that this is one of those times.

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The full text of the essay read aloud today can be found in the original post…

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“I settled on the name Liminal because one definition of the word is ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’ which for me speaks perfectly to the idea that everyone in the space is in their own unique way attempting to midwife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old.” - Joe Lightfoot

“Humor can be deeply subversive – not only by making authorities seem ridiculous, but by making light of the reality they attempt to impose.” - Charles Eisenstein 

“The metatribe is scientific without scientism. It is spiritual while being neither new age nor traditionally religious.” - Tyler Alterman

“I hope the magicians that do tricks for zoo monkeys know that the monkeys usually go insane and have to be euthanized.” - Duncan Trussell

Another Label? But Why?

The project of shoehorning the natural world’s spectrums and networks into a taxonomy of discrete, referential language doesn’t even vibe with the disposition of the thinkers, artists and scientists listed above, or that of their audiences… So why do it?

Because there’s power in a name. A thing that can be named can be manifested. An egregore with a name becomes more influential. A subculture that is aware it exists can proselytize. 

And, maybe narcissistically, I feel strongly that the world would benefit from Liminal Trickster Mystics.

My intuition is that there are a lot of us waking up right now or finally being honest about how we’ve always felt—a little off and outsidery. My raison d’être with the Creekmasons generally, and this essay in particular is to facilitate all of us coming together within the media sphere where our wackiness is authentically, aspirationally represented.

Wondering whether you belong? Let me break it down for you. What follows are the core traits of a Liminal Trickster Mystic (LTM). If he had visited the archipelago of books, Discord communities and podcast episodes that forms this subculture’s Galapagos, Darwin would have sketched out these traits in his journal.

As an expression of our liminality, we prioritize self-expression, we are polygnostic, and we support the translation of apocalypse as “unveiling.”

To qualify as trickster, to varying degrees, we express a love of embracing taboo, making self-deprecating jokes, and abhorring hierarchy. Like many history’s tricksters, we are often anarchists.

And although some are more mystical than others, almost all of us share tolerance, if not respect, if not an obsession with the power of myth, (being near to but not belonging to) the New Age movement, and magick and mind causality.

Put another way, we don’t belong on any side of any polarity, we don’t take anything too seriously, and we look for meaning in everything.

And for the home crowd, let’s relate this back to the creek from which the Creekmasons get our name: 

• We feel best inhabiting the liminal places, like suburban creeks full of pseudo nature.

• True tricksters, we playfully mock the mores of sober, domesticated, cultural wastelands, experimenting with psychedelics and radical philosophy.

• And with the help of that chemical experimentation, we mystically co-create meaning by weaving stories from inferences deduced via examination of artifacts left behind by the people we share our spot with.

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Liminal

Joe Lightfoot deserves a share of credit for this essay. You may recognize the single rhetorical act with which he birthed the Liminal Web as my obvious inspiration, but I’m hoping to convey more of a reverent homage than some kind of poseur plagiarism. Although he coined the Liminal Web, the similarities between the specific cluster of thought-leaders that I’ve listed here haven’t, to my knowledge, been identified.

And it is “identified,” not “invented.” As with Lightfoot’s thesis, mine rests on this subculture being an emergent phenomenon. 

Lightfoot’s reason for picking the word “Liminal” begins this article—a very “metamodern sensemaker” disposition toward hospicing Game A and midwifing Game B. The word liminal resonated with me much more deeply, though, even when I first encountered his essay. 

Even LTM fans exhibit the very liminal quality of mediating from the middle of the political divide. Possibly, it’s partially motivated by conflict avoidant personalities, but it’s still ostensibly virtuous. There is an ever-present emphasis on respect, compassion and the inefficacy of shame in LTM circles.

We appreciate that everything is on a spectrum and feel comfortable inhabiting the space between poles.

Furthermore, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, I find credulity mildly repulsive. It’s like stepping in dogshit to encounter absolute certainty—allegiance to blue or red, science or magick, vaccination or not, Atheism or God, etc. It’s tiring. It lacks nuance. Restricting yourself to one side of an argument—and often inventing a monolith for the Other—can’t accurately contain reality’s deluge of gray area. 

So, what to do if dogshit dogmatism’s got you down? Rinse the stink off your sole with your smartphone thumb intensifying the garden hose of liminality!

What makes an LTM Liminal? They are…

Self-Expression Prioritizing

Duncan Trussell, best known for the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast that supplied audio for the mind-blowing Midnight Gospel Netflix series, is more or less the prototype for the archetype. In the utterly arbitrary—but hopefully illustrative—coordinate system above, my gut ranking for Trussell has him as the most mystical trickster and the most trickstery mystic. 

Months ago, he said something to a livestream of gathered fans along the lines of, “Yeah, I think we’re a subculture, but we don’t really have an aesthetic, do we?” 

Of course we don’t. As another LTM, Mitch Horowitz, points out in the book, Daydream Believer, self-expression is one of the highest values to protect. After all, if we each do “what is [authentically] ours to do” as quintessential LTM Charles Eisenstein says, we’ll heal this profoundly sick society.

Like immune system cells that know how to collaborate while also staying in their own lane, LTMs recognize that what is vital to me might not be vital to thee, though we should definitely do both. 

They are liminal through this rejection of the culture’s drive to erect, participate in and project monoliths of partisanship and polarization.

Can you imagine a white blood cell spewing hate toward a red blood cell because the latter is focused on coagulation and ignoring the body’s need for fighting infection? Why do we accept it when a person barfs vitriol into a comments section on an article about the bigotry crisis when the Climate Crisis is “obviously more urgent?” 

LTMs know the “Crisis Crisis” demands that we learn from each other, synthesize information from disparate sources and work together, but also that we unashamedly apply our influence where it is most welcome, effective, and naturally inclined to be directed. 

They tend not to proselytize for a team because they’re happy we’re all unique. 

By the way, I’ll happily grant the irony inherent in writing that here, in an essay that acts as a stab at self-definition aiming to attract others to the LTM team. Can it be justified? Well, here’s my thought: being on Team Liminal is a little like being on all teams at once and choosing, situation by situation, to present the side of yourself to the world that most effectively suits your objectives.

Polygnostic

Douglas Rushkoff is another true liminal. In one of his Team Human podcast episodes, he told the story of describing the famous discordian, Robert Anton Wilson, as “believing in nothing.” RAW insisted that wasn’t quite right. It was more accurate to say he believed everything simultaneously.

LTMs share RAW’s philosophy. As far as I know, I’m the one to have coined “polygnosticism:” poly- meaning many, and -gnosis, meaning knowing or better yet, grokking. LTMs believe everything at once; what comes through moment by moment depends mostly on what is appropriate, effective and beneficial to all involved.

It’s a kind of William James-esque philosophical pragmatism that is married with that apocryphally Aristotelian quote: “It is the mark of an educated mind that they can entertain an idea without accepting it.”

When confronted with conflict, LTMs don’t aggressively attempt to out-masculine their opponents with shame or a dunking; they begin by agreeing wherever alignment exists, then interpolate additional narrative or data into the argument that provokes doubt or a critical reframe.

They’ll use “both/and” sentence construction that finds value in apparently contradictory clauses. 

LTMs are wont to embrace paradox. 

Purveyors of “Apocalypse as an Unveiling”

One of my favorite acid tests is to travel back in time whenever I discover a new podcast or thinker to whatever content they were putting out during March and April of 2020. How did they frame the apparent apocalypse we were living through?

For every one of the twenty-one LTMs I rattled off the top of my head for the chart above, if I was successful in performing this exercise, I was struck by the similarity of their approaches. Each one framed the crises of 2020 via some variant of reference to the Greek etymology of apocalypse, which is roughly “to lift the veil.” Importantly, while other subcultures may have noted similar observations, many of these LTMs heralded the unveiling with optimism, not fear, outrage or despair. To them, the suddenly crumbling faux-stability of civilization’s extraction-based forever-growth model felt a little like kicking off a too-tight shoe.

Again, as Lightfoot said, they each have “their own unique way attempting to midwife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old.”

Although it’s unlikely that LTM’s on the less mystical side of the spectrum would be entirely convinced by medium Paul Selig’s conversations with his incorporeal Guides, many of them would still support one of the Guides’ primary messages: as a civilization, we are in the midst of addressing a collective shadow that has been ignored for too long. 

I find myself recounting the metaphor that the Guides use often; it’s a comforting perspective on our Interesting Times. 

As a species, they say, we are currently engaged in excavation. There are skeletons buried in our backyard which we intend to extract, but first we have to dig up everything we’ve hidden underground. So right now, our space is in a chaotic tumult, dirt everywhere. It’s not pretty, but it is necessary to get the skeletons out and begin the project of planting something beautiful and fragrant in the reclaimed and renovated space.

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Trickster

Many LTMs, like Jessa Reed and Duncan Trussell, are comedians who have undergone some kind of spiritual awakening. Others, like Shefali Tsabary and Brene Brown, are serious thinkers who recognize that storytelling—and humor—is the most effective route toward changing minds.

Maybe this is a Neil Postman thing: everyone has to be an entertainer now because TV has radically disrupted our expectations of public intellectuals just as much as it’s disrupted everything else… But LTMs elevate prioritizing entertainment to a moral good by recognizing the role that humor can play in dispelling taboo, oppression and the overwrought seriousness of partisanship.

Taboo Embracing

I know this will be a controversial point. 

A point difficult to apply equally to every LTM I’ve listed, much less every LTM who will read this article. I think it's true though: most members of this subculture are oriented toward earnest attempts to be respectful toward identity politics, but not entirely convinced that wokeness consistently clears the hurdle of being gestural equality that Power is happy to placate in favor of real equality.

If the Pentagon is out here flying rainbow flags for Pride month, there must not be much danger to the established systems of oppression, exploitation and extraction that the alphabet soup of American intelligence agencies is sworn to preserve.

So some LTMs will sometimes step on propriety. Most are progressive in some sense, but many are willing to embrace topics taboo to the Left. They’ll even platform people with their podcasts who cling to language circling atavism’s drain who uphold what might be considered, charitably, “traditional Western values.” 

But like a Hatha Yoga flow, for every stretch there is a counter-stretch. 

For every taboo broken, there is an opportunity to cultivate silence, hold up the mic and compassionately listen to a historically disadvantaged person’s lived experience.

Some White Male LTMs may even feel called to step aside and let another demographic take the lead. Maybe being groomed by a colonist, supremacist patriarchy to be Burdened with a savior complex ought to disqualify one from architecting the next—more beautiful—world.

But white fragility merits an essay of its own. For now, it’s best to leave it at this: despite being unconvinced by the revolutionary oomph of Identity Politics, the liminal approach is to avoid going too far in the other direction and ignorantly proclaiming diction isn’t causative. Proclaiming erroneously that it isn’t, let’s just say it, Magick.

Self-Deprecating

Despite what I’ve just implied about the LTM relationship with White Male Fragility, very few LTMs fit neatly into the cultural stereotypes of leaders. 

They tend to have some kind of outsider identity.

Yes, although they might be underrepresented, many LTMs are women and POC, but the ones who aren’t were bullied, religious minorities, mentally ill, chronically ill. Something innate tends to incline them toward Othered ideological outlooks. 

You know because they’ll tell you. LTMs are famously self-deprecating. 

Their Trickster nature doesn’t allow them to even hold their own ego as something sacred that can’t be mocked. The public persona of an LTM is vulnerable and imperfect. They’ll confess to challenges. They’ll own up to character flaws.

Truthfully, they each have the recipe to embody the unscrupulous Guru archetype: a touch of the mystical, a scoop of the political, and a healthy measure of razor-sharp wit.

Occasionally, I wish they’d take a match to the stove and stir fry those ingredients—along with their missing arrogance—to actualize their ideals and change the world. 

But their reluctance is part of why I love them.

Anarchist

I’d argue you can’t be a guru and an anarchist. Why? Well before we continue, anarchists have ceded their public image’s definition to their political opponents, so you can’t be blamed if the designation calls to mind violent, careless, callous chaos beings. 

But hold off on recoiling from anarchy and consider what the word really means because, as David Graeber says, “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You.” Here’s some self-evaluation questions cribbed from that essay that will give you a good idea of true anarchist values.

• If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?

• Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?

• Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?

• Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)? For example, “It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others...” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.”

• Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?
  Note: the right answer to this one is No.

The Guy Fawkes mask-clad vigilante in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta inspired a lot of people during Occupy Wall Street—and in more ways than choice of headwear. The trickstery anarchist organizations that provide Mutual Aid to this day encourage laughter and rebellion in the face of authority; light-hearted, revolutionary and sincere.

LTMs tend to be accepting of any political affiliation, apart from fascism, but you definitely get bonus points for being an anarchist. 

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Mystic

Similar to my uncertainty regarding the true popularity of Jungian archetypes, I am also never sure whether there is a mass awakening happening, or whether my algorithmically curated filter bubble is giving me the false perception that I’m not alone in my insanity.

Jiddu Krishnamurti’s assertion that “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” will undoubtedly be familiar to many LTMs, however. If we are insane for being a little off-kilter and outside the mainstream, many of us wear the badge of a diagnosis with pride. I’ve fought a personal crusade to destigmatize mental illness through frequent and casual disclosure, going so far as to “out” myself as Bipolar into a mic during a company All-Hands at a previous employer.

Why talk so much about mental illness when approaching the topic of LTM’s appreciation of mysticism? It comes down to a different quote, this one from Joseph Campbell: “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

Many of us have experienced the frantic flailing to keep our heads above the surface that accompanies what the Woo community calls an awakening. Many of us have also been accused of swimming with delight in strange waters, courageously exploring ideas that challenge or outright contradict a default narrative.

Put more simply, LTMs qualify as mystics because we often feel drawn to meditation, contemplation, or other spiritual practices in service of our search for a deep, intuitive understanding of the universe. We tend to be undaunted when that understanding starts to wobble away from the worldview of our square coworkers and neighbors.

Myth Appreciating

Most fundamentally, the Mysticism of the LTM mindset shows respect for mythology's significance. 

The LTM movement is adjacent to the sensemaking milleiu, and can compete for—or at least make a good case to share—the moniker of metamodernism. As such, many LTMs are interested in awakening from the Meaning Crisis that we find ourselves in as the colonialist, supremacist patriarchy we didn’t ask to inherit crumbles around us. 

It’s a little like a huddle around a campfire. We’re snug together against the winds of change, scooching close for warmth and compassion as the myths collapse that granted civilization its coherence and justified a privileged place in it for the largely white and male LTMs.

Unlike some more reactionary public intellectuals, LTMs tend to consider it a plus on the whole that the dominator mindset is finally imploding. That collection of narratives has promoted deforestation, mass extinction, prairie destruction, wetland shrinking, parking lot construction, and countless other profanities disgracing our planet.

But what comes next? As we sit around the campfire, what stories are we telling? Will we reclaim old myths and indigenous wisdom? Can we hope to adopt the more prosocial and pro-ecological dispositions those older stories engender? It’s an attractive option.

After all, LTMs know that you can only act in the sphere in which you imagine action is possible and that that sphere is delineated by myth.

Self-Consciously Not New Age

With the notable exception of Mitch Horrowitz, who embraces the New Age moniker proudly, LTMs often self-consciously insist they should not be lumped in with that fluffy-headed movement. However, they can still sometimes be similarly vulnerable to accusations of cultural appropriation. 

It might be a fair criticism. You kind of need a colonialist attitude to excuse this ubiquitous orientation toward synthesis of the world’s wisdom traditions into a Perennial Philosophy. LTMs tend to sample chaotically from the buffet of religiosity, picking up whatever feels authentic and energizing to them in particular and leaving behind what they view as unimportant or morally atavistic. 

Remember the love of authentic anarchy and the emphasis on self-expression that are espoused by LTMs? This eclectic, Chaote, Amalgamator approach to spirituality is another manifestation of that same prioritization of self-determination. 

I struggle with whether it’s arrogant to presume we’re welcome in these traditions, but surely the adherents to any ideology that promises enlightenment would be excited by the prospect of more people becoming enlightened, right?

As a result, almost all LTMs are interested in or practicing some form of meditation. Whether it’s Visualization, Vipassana, Pranayama, Hoffing, Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness, or Kirtan doesn’t really matter. The only overarching rule is general interest in mysticism and a rejection of the dogmatism expressed by the nihilist scientific materialists who prop up Default Reality.

Magick and Mind Causality

Just like the Liminal and the Trickster sections, the qualities in the Mystic section are ordered from less-to-more as well. This is important to point out, because there are absolutely some thinkers who I’ve identified as LTMs in the lower half of the chart above who might consider Aleister Crowley-style magick and occultism frivolous superstition. 

However…

Too many LTMs take Conner Habib’s stance regarding magick—that it is real, but can often be explained using language that bridges the Woo and scientific materialist divide—for this article to ignore.

LTMs like Jessa Reed and Jason Louv are especially adept at this translation particularly when embodying their most widely-distributed-media personas. As I’ve arbitrarily depicted in the chart above, they adroitly calibrate their Woo levels to be appropriate to the audience. They both drop hints about the magick and mind metaphysics that they’re into on more mainstream podcasts, but in Reed’s language they come across as self-mocking jokes, and in Louv’s, they take the form of innocuous winks. For example, on Rushkoff’s Team Human, Louv quipped something to the effect of, “If confirmation bias ensures that you’ll only see what your subconscious is looking for, why not use occult techniques to program your subconscious to see what you actually want it to?”

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After all that, I still ask myself the question: why would anyone self-identify as a Liminal Trickster Mystic?

Why write at all?

“As it is said, the Dao that can be named is not the true Dao. It is similarly difficult to pin down, define, or write about liminal spaces, mystics, and thinking. That's part of what liminal means.  Once we define it, it's not liminal anymore." 

I got that note from Node, Creekmason, and definite LTM, John Baometrus when I shared this essay with the Creekmasons. He's got a point. To “define" is to “make finite” and a trickstery feature of the liminality this essay endeavors to pin down is that it's more of a shifting range on a fractal spectrum than a finite point.

So why bother? 

Because I’ve always felt alone.

“From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again and again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I’d stop fucking up the party. They wanted to push me outside, where the freaks huddled in the cold. Out there with the misfits, the broken, glazed-eye types who can only watch as the normals enjoy their shiny new cars and careers and marriages and vacations with the kids.” - David Wong (Jason Pargin), John Dies at the End

You caught me. 

This whole essay—this whole attempt at social movement evocation—was just a smokescreen. I named a nascent subculture because I want to find my people. I’m inviting you, reader, to identify with this clique so that we can hang out and build something better, together.

Isn’t “connection” why pretty much everyone does anything? 

Reader! Does this seem pitiable? Or did you also feel a little apart from zeitgeist after zeitgeist? Have you nuzzled your exotic, utopian ideals, feeling love for the world that you suspected might always remain unrequited? 

Do you enjoy the content of one or more Liminal Trickster Mystic?

Seek out the others.

Through more of us consuming content in this ecosystem and leaving links in our cookies- and cache-based data exhaust, the recommendation algorithms that govern and curate everyone’s online experiences will identify a new identity it can expose to those chilling on its periphery. The lonely tricksters and solitary mystics in whom it is so easy to see ourselves… they need saving. The world needs saving.

Help proliferate an identity that promotes the ideals of self-determination, individual agency, spiritual inquiry, challenging fascism, having a laugh and, yes, saving the world. 

Be as self-deprecating as you want; you’ve got to admit those are good goals.

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Known Liminal Trickster Mystic Substacks

Alphabetical. If you believe you should be included here (or want to be removed), please let me know via Substack DM!

Charles Eisenstein

Essays on civilization. myth, politics, ecology

The Art of Sharing, the Sharing of Art

How much can you share?

By Content Carrier

Rushkoff

I write about how we can sustain our humanity in a highly digital world.

By Douglas Rushkoff

Faith Integrates

Sounding the depths and scaling the heights of the trauma-informed Gospel to find healing, wholeness, and freedom.

By Faith Worley

WorldsArise

Cultivating mental and emotional resilience through Buddhist practice and insight.

By John Baometrus

After Babel

Using moral psychology to explain why so much is going wrong

By Jon Haidt

diary of a child soul 🐬🌈

the art of becoming real ❤️‍🔥

By jordan bates 🦦

Layman Pascal

I respond to questions on Postmetaphysics, Nonduality, Metamodernism, Integral Metatheory, New Shamanism, Future of Religion, Developmental Philosophy and Meta-progressive politics (usually through a decoy topic). Audio for paid subscribers only.

UNRAVELING, UNMOORED

An invitation to slow time.

By Libby Walkup

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Unabridged Link Directory

Alphabetical. If you believe you should be included here (or want to be removed), please let me know via Substack DM!

• Amos J Hunt

• Bo Burnham

• Brene Brown

• Charles Eisenstein (Substack)

• Colin Reinagel

• Content Carrier (Substack)

• Conner Habib

• Damien Echols

• Deborah Eden Tull

• Douglas Rushkoff (Substack)

• Dr. Cynthia Miller

• Dr. Shefali Tsabary

• Duncan Trussell

• Eben Alexander

• Esoteric Hoe (Substack)

• Faith Worley (Substack)

• Gabriel Durham

• Isaac Moraga

• Jason Louv

• Jeffrey Williams and Tiffany Sears

• Jessa Reed

• Joe Wong

• John Baometrus (Substack)

• Jonathon Haidt (Substack)

• Jordan Bates (Substack)

• jt

• Layman Pascal (Substack)

• Libby Walkup (Substack)

• Lisa Feldman Barrett

• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Dr. Daniel Ingram

• Mitch Horowitz

• Noah Lampert

• Olix (Substack)

• Paul Selig

• Seth Godin

• Shane Mauss

• UFO of God by Chris Bledsoe

• Wim Hof

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Deborah Eden Tull, founder of the nonprofit Mindful Living Revolution, is Zen meditation/mindfulness teacher, author, and spiritual activist. She spent seven years as a monastic at a silent Zen Monastery, and has been immersed in sustainable communities for 25 years. Eden’s teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, non-duality, mindful inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She also facilitates The Work That Reconnects, as created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy. Eden has been practicing meditation for the past 30 years and teaching for over 20 years. Her books include Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown (Shambhala 2022), Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet (Wisdom 2018), and The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide to the Sustainable Food Revolution (Process Media 2011). She lives in Black Mountain,North Carolina, Cherokee land, and offers retreats, workshops, leadership trainings, and consultations internationally.

E-mail | Website | Instagram | Facebook | Youtube

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Intro: Shadow LARPing

I’m pacing back and forth. Hyperventilating. I’d call it the stressed pacing of a caged tiger, but that would be more self-aggrandizement than I’m comfortable with. It would convey too much calm, predatory precision.

It doesn’t fit. In this memory, I am frantic. Wild-eyed. Near to feral.

The door to exit the room is blocked by the person I’m arguing with. They’re a quarter of the way to crouching and holding up their hands like a football player trying to prevent a sack. I hear them say:

“You’re acting crazy. Just calm down.”

The strange thing is, I feel calm. I feel totally, utterly calm. Calmly, I watch my chest heave. With calm, detached curiosity, I note my flailing expression of limbs as I snarl, “Just let me leave.”

Thanks to TikTok, I will learn later that this “calmness” is called dissociation. 

I will understand myself a bit better the next time it shows up. When I am free of that terrible relationship, better acquainted with my Bipolar diagnosis, and only experiencing echoes of similar behavior through being unintentionally triggered. Only losing my shit like that when confronted with the confounding variables of catastrophes as severe as a global pandemic.

It’s mostly behind me. But learning about it sheds light on another phenomenon. In a way, that dissociative sensation is present in just about all enactments of my shadow. 

If I can generate enough mindfulness, I can watch my body go through the motions of being an asshole, of choosing to consume something I know I’ll regret, of making a snippy or off-color comment I can tell—even as I say it—will become fodder for future shame and remorse.

All of it is a bit like a LARP. 

That’s “Live Action Role-Playing” for people who had less nerdy childhoods. Even those cooler kids among the Nodes in the Net audience will probably remember the goofily dressed teenagers shouting, “Firebolt! Firebolt! Firebolt!” while throwing bean bags at each other on early YouTube. 

Ultimately, the expression of shadow characteristics is me roleplaying. Like acting out a little scene that I don’t really feel, identify with, or intend. Roleplaying as the Elitist, or the Hothead, or the Doormat. None of those is truly me.

(Is there even a “me”?)

Ultimately, the entire human experience is one of pretending to be something other than we truly are: a single soul field, a single source roleplaying as billions of humans, pretending that we are each separate individuals with our own unique problems and strengths and purposes for incarnating. 

Like a madman conversing with his own finger puppets, pretending each digit has a different personality.

Nothing is real. Nothing can be identified with. Everything is God in drag. The divine in cosplay. Brahmin LARPing as Atmans LARPing as egos. 

And the more we embrace, integrate and love the aspects of ourselves that we would cast into shadow—the wisdom of the Elitist, or the anger of the Hothead, or the submissiveness of the Doormat—the less often our bodies can become hijacked and express those characteristics in a way that causes harm.

It gets to be that when the angry part of you whispers that the world needs your anger, you listen right away. Anger becomes a healthy, effective way to get your needs met, set firm boundaries, and dismantle injustice. 

It’s a solid way to go from being dissociatively mystified by my “Hothead” LARP: anger doesn’t need to scream to get my attention. 

My shadow is coming to learn that I respect it enough to express it when it can be of service.

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Lift up anything heavy.
Find a way to make a stranger more comfortable.
Let’s build something better together.

🪨┃🌜┃lunar-lunacy is sort of like a Creekmasons group art project! It’s meant to be a place where anyone who wants to make art can come up with things together. It’s especially geared toward those aspiring to become Adeptus Makers (Creatives who are published by the Content Collective), but we’d love to see you sign up even if you have no desire to ever have your work shared publicly.

This is a mini-oasis in a cultural wasteland where you can earn rep, share and receive feedback, and build connection.

Join the Discord to Participate!

A like ❤️ and a share 🔁 are super welcome as well. Perhaps you know a Liminal Trickster Mystic out there somewhere who is just dying to become a word wielding Lunatic? Send them our way!

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Song: The Moon

Mason: Quell

Poem: SCREAMING AT GOD

Mason:

SCREAMING AT GOD

If there was a tonic,
If there was a pill,
I’d turn my back on god and
Surrender to the real .

Beaten up and lying
Coated in my blood,
Knowing I’m denying
The why behind these cuts.

Brainlessly I’m lurching
Closer to the truth:
All my needless searching;
Addicted to my muse;

All my exploration
Of vague but sacred texts;
All my strange fixations;
The stillness with no rest;

A seeker never finding.
Delusional and weird.
Ostracized and hiding:
A shaman no one hears.

Outcast, yes, but maybe
Hermits coexist
Crazy, raging, raving
Party on the fringe.

Doing ayahuasca—
Leaving earth behind—
Doing dishes also.
Home, our twisted minds.

SINK OR SWIM, I’M CAUGHT IN
THE WATERS OF THE PATH—
IN WAVES I’M CAST PSYCHOTIC
BUT CAN’T FORGET. I CAN’T.

Poem: Howl at the Moon

Mason: FR33-K3y

Loose translations come first-
well second hand lung burst-
Howling was sung cursed-
How could it become worse?-
Time sure is some nurse-
Initially from thirst-
Fallowed by hungers-
Anger fades to converse-

Became layered correspondence-
Estranged from before remonstrance-
Left Unpursude in obscondance-
Long passed and has not spawned since-
Playful meta has themed from a long rinse-
Witty banter teasing maya's strong hints-
Still vibes i ride, sound bang the gongs dense-
Symbolic Confusion formally wrong prince-

Howl the futility even though i often try-
How safe are words my safe word is octopi-
Spend more time spotting 3s then that Jon Stockton guy-
Cross the T, spilt to see connected dot the I-
Lies dug in deep too many bought to fly-
Weavos con whatever, there's still a lot to try-
Not done Dundee, don’t touch that crocodile-
Reflections a blast team rocket style-

Essay: The Moon You’re Screaming at is not the Moon

Mason: Gabriel Durham - Nintozen

Throughout the old "eastern" world, there is a repeated metaphor involving the moon. Taoism says "the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." Buddhist lexicons will inevitably have some poem about a "moon reflected in water" not being the real moon. So when I saw the theme for this season's post, this was the first place my mind went.

I think it is true as well. Very often what we are screaming at while facing the real moon is not the moon.

People seem to continually use the external world as a metaphor to either make sense of their internal world, or to somehow "intervene" in the form of omens. Our internal world becomes confusing and dense so we look to the outside world for a "sign" that might cause the internal world to fall back into order and rally around the sign.

Also, when people feel hollow inside, they will look to the external world to fill them back up. Even then, however, it is the internal void to be filled that drives them, not the actual qualities of the "real".

So this lunar lunacy, I wonder what I am screaming at and it is a hard season to say. Is it my father slowly dying? My mother's exhaustion in caring for him? My work in the environment and how deeply saddening it can be with all the loss? The fact that everyone I know is experiencing financial hardship to the point where none of us feel free to morn because it's "happening to everyone"? Or is the screaming just a habit at this point?

I do not know anymore.

But if I follow the finger pointing at the moon backwards, I find my heart.

Behind my heart I find a scale balanced between grief and deep gratitude. The things I am thankful for are impermanent and as they flow, they turn into grief. These are also impermanent so as they flow, they are reborn into gratitude.

Meanwhile the moon hangs there, simply the moon. Now cut free from the metaphorical burdens of my heart, its beauty sines light on my grief and gratitude so that they too, can be themselves.

Playlist: singing on the moon

Mason: jt

Want your writing or artwork featured here? Join the Discord! We’d love to have more Lunar Lunatics!

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Even if you've already read "Yes-And-Ness" Outshines "Radical Acceptance", today's episode is worth main-lining for the medium-length, medium-mania rant I am broadcasting straight into your cortex.

Just try to shut me up about the cultural moment we find ourselves in, in which we have unprecedented access to the genius of spiritual traditions from across the globe.

We have an opportunity to marry the perspectives of both Radical Responsibility and Radical Acceptance into one integral whole that enables us to transcend the limits of somnambulant samsara, and awaken into a liberated state that also honors the wonder, beauty, and strangeness of our embodied, intuitive, receptive and squishy selves.

Join our Digital Sangha by signing up to the mailing list at Creekmasons.com in order to receive email notifications for essays like this one, AND the brilliant work of co-conspirator, collaborator and co-creator of the Creekmasons, Colin Reinagel!

If you like what you’re finding around there, join our community! You can learn more about our Anarcho-Indie Publishing Collective and JOIN THE DISCORD all by heading to Creekmasons.com.

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The full text of the essay read aloud today can be found in the original post…

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Because yes, pain is inevitable and accepting pain has the potential to nix suffering caused by resistance or attachment. In a lecture, Brach quotes a Buddhist Nun who attempts, in every circumstance, to address the universe with: “Thank you for this experience, I have no complaints.” 

We know intuitively that those words can’t be rightly applied to every circumstance. 

That 5% or more of horrifying edge-cases calls for something else: it calls for “yes-and-ness.”

We can think of yes-and-ness as the single word that summarizes the Serenity Prayer. It’s the requisite serenity to accept what can’t be changed, and simultaneously, the courage to exert our will and agency to change that which is within our influence. 

The way it’s often presented, Eastern mysticism focuses on serenity, equanimity, surrender, acceptance, and the ego-death that is implied in the Ram Dass quote, “The Great Way is not difficult for he who holds no preference.” 

Opinions are mixed and it might actually run counter to the original intentions of the spiritual luminaries who delivered these teachings, but in the Western circles colonized by these Eastern ideas, an emphasis is placed on letting go of your desires. Instead, the focus is on serving structures greater than yourself. The way they talk about Eastern cultures being centered more on the collective rather than the individual. Centered on We rather than I.

Meanwhile, Western occultism can be characterized as the opposite. There’s an emphasis on exerting your Will on your surroundings. Creating sigils, working spells, binding servitors, banishing unwanted influences. Engaging in rituals to master your own mind, attract or manifest your desires, and generally bend reality. As Crowley said, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

In this massive oversimplification, the East represents Receptivity, Divine Feminine, Plural, We and in other words, the “yes” of yes-and-ness. Meanwhile the West covers Agency, Divine Masculine, Singular, I, and of course, the “and”. 

The “-ness” is a posture of liminal vacillation between the two, never becoming dogmatic about embodying one over the other. It’s a disposition to being open to spontaneously choosing to tilt focus more heavily on “yes” or “and” as each situation demands. 

And often, it means being flexible enough to bring both.

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A Possibly Flawed Translation of Eastern “Acceptance”

Radical Acceptance is tricky. Like many newcomers to the Buddhist slash New Age scenes, until I realized they were actually advocating for “yes-and-ness,” I balked at the assertion that every moment is perfect as is.

Perhaps because of cynical people intentionally misinterpreting New Ageism, flattening it into a one-dimensional parody, Western Buddhist advocates like podcaster, Duncan Trussell, feel the need to caveat Radical Acceptance for situations like rape and robbery. They ask, “Where do you draw the line?” Clearly you shouldn’t surrender to the situation if you’re stuck in a violent abusive relationship. What about a boss that yells at you? Or even simpler: what about a refused raise? 

I believe this is a misunderstanding. 

Ordinally, Radical Acceptance is closer to the “giving up” that “surrender” implies than is common in the ethos of macho patriarchal Western culture, where our heroes often stand up, sock the bad guy in the jaw, and save the day. 

Compared to that, Radical Acceptance is more feminine and receptive, but ultimately, it’s not supposed to be absolute: I doubt very much that Brach would say not to stand up to your abuser. 

Buddhists tend to be more comfortable with paradox: everything is perfect, and we need to fight to make it better. 

The maxim is meant to imply something more like “yes-and-ness” than newbies and critics realize, but the connotations of the choice in translation do lend themselves to confusion. Thus the pitch for a new term.

The confusion arises in what it means to "accept" something. The English connotation of "putting up with" a situation, is probably not intended to be ubiquitously attached to “acceptance.” 

It seems Brach and others are actually advising, in part, that we simply acknowledge a moment’s existence.

As RamDev Dale Borglum says in a different podcast with Trussell, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s assertion that “this is hopeless,” doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no hope that a situation might change or improve over time. It might not even mean that enlightenment is impossible or that Nirvana is unattainable. 

It just means that right here, right now, there is no hope for this moment to be any less painful.

Language shares some of the blame for this confusion. Radical acceptance is often mentioned in the same breath as "surrender" and to many, it connotes "consent." The US is a country that associates surrender with weakness. With throwing in the towel and giving up. 

(Which Rocky never did of course, regardless of how bloody and broken he got.)

Maybe thanks to software Terms and Conditions, “accept” feels almost interchangeable with “submit.” Tech giants covertly reinforce our submissive relationship to them with that word; it makes sense that we’d have difficulty with acceptance if we relate it to submitting to things that happen to us. 

Where is the agency? The control?

It might be a mistranslation. It might also be a willful reimagining of Buddha’s teachings that was intended to justify oppressive systems of class structure. It can be argued that Eastern philosophy is tainted by its historical use to urge acceptance of one’s place in society, no matter how low and degrading. Should the poor and oppressed really accept their fate and not strive for social change? Hard to argue in favor of passive acceptance of injustice and inequality.

Despite these criticisms, an appropriately nuanced understanding of Radical Acceptance has merit. 

Like any working model of how to act, it has limitations, but when it comes to accepting inclement weather or traffic, you’ll certainly reduce stress and boost resilience. Plus, accepting your emotions, thoughts, and feelings—as opposed to futilely attempting to suppress or control them—creates the conditions to express those aspects of your personality in a healthy, effective way. 

It tends to be that when we pretend something isn’t happening or when we bypass our difficult emotions with spiritual platitudes that our ability to act in accordance with our values and intentions is compromised. The same way that someone walking across a sidewalk covered in frogs is more likely to step on one if they are pretending the frogs don’t exist. Noisy, icky, potentially even deadly—at least for the frog.

Still, we could possibly benefit from a less loaded word to describe the concept of Radical Acceptance. One that indicates recognition of reality without either pretending that something isn't happening or wishing that it were different, but also without consenting to or "putting up with" the situation.

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Flawed New Age Radical Responsibility

Swing too far in the other direction and you get in trouble too, though. There is a recurrent thread in New Age philosophy that consent is the ultimate arbiter of experience. It takes a real bastard to say that to someone grieving or in the midst of oppressive circumstances: “Remember, you are responsible for creating your reality!” or “Don’t focus on the negative of your cat dying, your mind manifests experience!” or “Whether you believe you can [escape wage slavery], or believe you can’t, you’re correct!”

There are certainly those who derive solace and empowerment in the theories of causative mental attitudes, the New Thought, the Law of Attraction, or The Secret. There are plenty who find some comfort in the idea they have signed “soul contracts” and agreed before they incarnated to go through specific traumas and deficiencies in order to tick off boxes burning karma for soul-level godhood-actualization.

Quintessential New Age medium and Liminal Trickster Mystic, Paul Selig channels Guides who propose a philosophy of consent as a fundamental aspect of reality and of human experience. According to the Guides, everything that happens in our lives is a result of our consent, whether conscious or unconscious. The Guides argue that when we give our consent to negative experiences or circumstances or even institutions like banks or war, we empower them and make them a part of our reality.

The Guides would say that “nothing operates without your consent” in their characteristically confident and unequivocal way. But to operate at that level of certainty, without any nuance at all, is a bit like madness. 

They use an example frequently: you consent to know a bank as a bank and so the bank exists. Granted, banks are a social construct. If enough people agreed to stop recognizing the authority of fiat currency, banks would just be buildings with people in them. But my solo mental rebellion is unlikely to change objective reality. 

This is a radical interpretation of mind causality—the theory that we create the universe with our thoughts. I wonder whether it might be another example of a misinterpretation of mysticism. 

We may not configure matter and drive events with our minds, but most psychologists will grant that we only interact with our projections:

• I don’t know fellow Node, jt; I know my idea of jt

• But that doesn't mean I create jt

• I just create my idea of jt

I think it's fun to play with how much you can get away with private definitions of publicly agreed on concepts. 

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If I create an idea of student loan debt that involves never having to pay it back, at what point does consensus reality clash with and punish me for that delusion? If the winds continue to blow toward debt forgiveness, maybe never? That's the fun.

The Guides say, "The only power that anyone has over you is the power you give away." They suggest we can choose to allow agents and events to impact us and shape our reality, and that the key to creating a positive life is to be intentional and mindful about what we give our consent to.

Although it has the Western Hermetic slant of the power of Will, when the Guides assert our experience of reality is a direct reflection of our state of our mind, it is reminiscent of the arguments of Buddhists summarized above. There’s something familiar about the suggestion that the mind is the primary cause of our experiences and that our external circumstances can be reduced to external manifestations of our internal reality. 

In his Yoga Sutra’s, Patanjali says “Complete mastery over the modifications of the mind is called yoga.” Mental modifications, which might also be translated to “projections of the internal state onto external circumstances,” must be stilled for the bliss of samadhi.

Taken literally, however, Selig’s Guides’ promotion of the importance of consent is radical. Do we really want to believe, as Dean Spade critiques, that colonized peoples consented to their exploitation on a Soul level? Is anyone crazy enough to say that to a grieving mother? The sad answer is yes, people really are that callous. But even if it’s true and swallowing it is helpful, it’s violence to force that pill into the mouth of someone actively suffering.

Selig says you can change it. Brach is often interpreted as saying, "give up. It is what it is."

There's a marriage of these two ideas that is more moderate and it’s born simply by choosing a different phrase for "accept."

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Yes-and-ness, a Middle Way

I think that's what we’re looking for: the single word that summarizes the serenity prayer. 

You may have gathered that my pitch is for “Yes-and-ness.” 

Made famous by improv, the phrase "yes, and" encourages performers to build off each other's ideas. When you stumble blindly onto the stage and your comic troop partner says, “Why did Godzilla have to attack on the day before I retire?” you don’t respond, “No no no, I’ve got a better idea: you’re my highschool classmate and we’re nervous about PE later today.” 

You can’t build something together when you start off fundamentally denying the reality you’ve just walked into. 

You’re better off saying, “Yeah, and that vacation is going to have to wait; he’s coming this way!” Yes, you’re retiring and yes, Godzilla is attacking, and he’s coming this way.

Actually, sometimes improv isn’t that straight forward. Confronted by the same scene you could also roll your eyes and say, “Yeah, Murphy, I’m sure a giant, irradiated lizard is the only thing stopping you from retiring at 65 with no savings and no pension in this economy.” You’ve still agreed to the fundamental reality, but you’re challenging an aspect of what your partner said in a way that might just leave room for humor. 

Similarly, "yes-and-ness", encourages action on the knowledge that we’re meant to work with our experiences, rather than against them, while also asserting agency in our own framing and reaction.

When faced with crappy situations that bum me out, rather than trying to suppress or ignore my challenging emotions, I’ve been leading with "yes, and.” 

Yes, it’s a grim fact of reality that the circumstances of this moment can’t be improved from inside it. I accept reality as it is without grasping or aversion.

Yes, it’s “hopeless” to try to willfully change my emotional reaction. I accept my feelings without judgment or recrimination.

Yes, I may even have pre-agreed to this experience in order to learn a vital lesson during this incarnation. This trauma may be the exact thing that allows my soul to matriculate from reincarnating into chrysalis after chrysalis of mere matter and take flight into the infinite oneness of pure being.

AND none of that fucking matters to me right now because I have to do something to improve my situation. I will fight with every fiber. I will claw reality’s eyes out. I will flip over a cop car. Something has to change. 

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.” (Emphasis mine.)

Chapter 2, Verse 47 – Bhagavad Gita 

As Krishna says to Arjuna, you may not end up influencing your situation, but you have a right and responsibility to try. Can you accept a moment can’t be any other way while simultaneously showing you know your worth, standing up for yourself, upholding healthy boundaries, and generally ensuring the base layers of your Maslow pyramid are adequately met?

What changes when you approach a challenge with “Yes-and-ness?”

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You may already know Colin from recent contributions to the now collaborative Creekmason blog like Christ-like Suffering and Toxic Positivity in Wellness Culture. If you don't, what are you doing? Missing Newsletters?? Sign up already!

Check out⁠ ⁠Colin Reinagel⁠⁠'s website Weird Life Studios, to checkout out and purchase his art and make sure to follow him on ⁠Instagram⁠!

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Intro: The Great (co)Work(ers)

The last couple days my wife has been treating me like a dog that’s about to be put down. 

Instead of an entire filet mignon, though we have been to a few exotic restaurants, we’ve been adventuring to local attractions. Strolling through landmark gardens. Hiking stretches of closed down coastal highway. 

How lucky am I to have someone so sensitive to my mood that she manufactured these delightful distractions. How lucky am I to look into her eyes and find her watching mine? To see her seeing me.

Why has she been so tuned in to my needs? She knew that today was my first day back from paternity leave.

She guessed, rightly, that unless I burned off my energy it would be spent fueling rumination, anxiety, and stress. I got away with a mere smidge of paranoia about what I might be returning to at my day job.

The only expectation I really articulated to myself was met: I wasn’t laid off the minute I logged on.

But I still ended up feeling hurt.

It was that kind of hurt where you haven’t really done anything wrong but you still feel embarrassed by your predicament. Like it’s your fault that your toes were stepped on. Like you should feel ashamed of other people’s callousness, even though you’re its victim.

It’s not that big a deal. 

So I didn’t get a warmer welcome. So what?

So I was left like confused_travolta.gif from that scene in pulp fiction when I announced I was back. Wandering aimlessly, unacknowledged.

So, hours later, when I got a reply, my pics didn’t elicit so much as a "Look how cute that baby is!" just a "Thanks for the photos”… 

What else should I expect in what David Graeber called a Bullshit Job, where everyone dissociates and suppresses their true self? Graeber says a job qualifies as Bullshit if the employee themself can’t even justify how they spend their time.

I’ve got 10 years of angry, abusive assholes battling cigarette cravings and yelling “if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean” at me. I’ve been fired with zero notice so many times. These abusive bosses’ echoing voices are creating a mindset that I should somehow be earning my keep but that I ultimately will never be able to predict when I might be let go no matter how well I perform.

In the words of one Creekmason, I may have moved to a job where I get more status, pay and respect, but I’m no longer providing anything of value to anyone. I’m contributing nothing—just gradually chipping in to make civilization a little bit worse.

I’ve re-evaluated, and I think my actual workplace is the spiritual one. My actual vocation is the Great Work.

And that makes y’all my Great coWorkers. 

Just as I’m grateful to my wife for helping me navigate the anticipation and the first moments of pain at being ignored, I’m grateful to have the Creekmasons. 

What a privilege it is to have a Digital Sangha to whom I can bring emotional wounds like this one and receive all the little heart and hug emojis I could ask for. 

What a joy to be developing psychologically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually alongside this delightful group of wonderful, unique humans.

That is the Great Work after all. 

Could we all start answering that banal “What do you do for work” question like this?

“I endeavor to cultivate the mindfulness, investigation, energy, bliss, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity to pierce the illusions of incarnation and burn off the karmic seeds instilled by my culture before they flower into the poisonous perpetuation of white supramicist, patriarchal, imperial capitalism, meriting legitimate free will for me and peaceful, loving, coherent, awakened actualization for all beings.”

Because at least here, in this context of my refuge in a Collective of Creatives who are committed to each others’ growth, I’m happy to be back at Work.

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I attended a yoga class, intense and healing focused. The intention given for the class was to feel our bodies light up in ways we hadn’t felt before. My yoga practice had always been about finding the stuck places and then pushing through them—taking each pose to the furthest, deepest stretch I could reach. I had been told long ago that pain meant the work was working, so I pushed myself as far as I could hoping that it would heal some bad patterns and deeply held stress from trauma even more effectively.

I thought I should pursue release as aggressively as I could and that through enough hard work I could try to get back to who I used to be.

Never ceasing in self analysis, intense emotional releases, pushing myself to attain every sort of meditative state I could and always aggressively pursuing a different self. Unknowingly, echoing and copying the messages of shame from my childhood the whole time.

I was once the golden child of my family. My parents loved the ways I improved their reputation. But at some point that was all squandered and I was badly hurt. On top of being hurt I was, from then on, also shamed for even acting hurt.

Trauma led me to hide the light that used to draw people to my parents and it was replaced with anger, disdain, and sarcasm.

My parents were not happy with the changes.

My emotional, distant, and ungracious new personality became a focal point for my parents. As much as they could, they tried to fix me. They tried to compel me to fix myself via instilling beliefs and ideas into my pliable young mind. The conversion therapy went horribly, unimaginably off track and left me traumatized in ways that no one could’ve expected. Although it would later by grossly overshadowed; the unfortunately common pain of “conversion therapy” was still present. It originally started at home with my own parents as the facilitators. This was all layered on top of pain and social issues resulting from trauma, leading to no shortage of problems my parents thought I should fix.

Trauma’s resultant anti-social behavior—anger, numbness, dissociation, and generally being off-putting by being emotional—created a second space for the message that I “needed to change” to enter my life.

Public school.

My religious parents sent us to a small christian school, more like homeschool as the teachers were not certified and it closed when not enough people were attending. I started puberty, conversion therapy, 6th grade, and the trauma that would prompt my healing journey all within a matter of months. These repeated messages from my peers only confirmed what my parents had already laid down: that I had something very wrong with me and I needed to fix myself before I could be ok.

Returning to the yoga class that prompted me to write, to the instructor reminding the class, “Yoga is self-care, not self-torture.”

Self-Torture. The words struck me.

But it wasn’t until another writer compared their endless pursuit of therapeutic solutions to mental self-flagellation. That was when I saw it: thinking that by feeling and analyzing and crying and going through it all for the sake of healing; my mind went to middle school history and the Black Plague. One solution that people attempted was having groups of monks walking from town to town lashing themselves on the back with whips. They believed that the plague was God’s Punishment and that by punishing themselves they could mitigate some of the divine justice they believed themselves to be experiencing. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Maybe the plague was divine justice, maybe it was a consequence of the pope declaring cats to be demonic, igniting a cat genocide that allowed rats to thrive… but I digress.

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Years and years went by between these mirrors of pain and shame, beating myself up for being hurt. Adding judgment to suffering I started pushing myself as forcefully as I could into anything that helped even a little bit. Without any other explanation, or information, or agency I internalized the belief that being gay was the problem that needed fixing in order for my inner child to be loved and accepted by my parents and peers. That was the first thing that I was running away from.

I began shaping my life around how I could best repress and “fix” myself. I kept down this path, meeting with church leaders, tracking porn-usage, and treating my young self like an addict in recovery instead of a teenager in puberty. To this day my father will tell you that homosexuality is my burden to deal with like how another person might struggle with kleptomania or addiction.

The mindset was not entirely unhelpful, through those meditative sessions and letting the large emotions out as largely as it needed to eventually helped. At 19 I turned a corner, realizing that I was just damaging myself trying to fix something that was never broken to begin with. That opened the door for me to finally work on the real pain I was holding.

That wouldn't reveal itself until another 3 years later, but all the while, I still held so much shame. I was still running. I just didn’t know what exactly I was running from. The work paid off for me very recently. Opening up and speaking truth to my experience—starting with my earlier essay Christ-Like Suffering and extending to sharing with others in my life and in my family—set in motion a domino effect that improved every aspect of my life in a matter of days. From conversion therapy to working for a LGBT+ health clinic. From isolation to friends and community. From holding myself in—like a breath I don’t ever want to exhale—to living openly and allowing the fallout of my experience to actually fall out onto those responsible instead of continuing to blame myself. 

I find myself in a new place then, where I cannot continue in the way I have been going.

By always going back to who I was at my worst and running from that person, I only strengthened the idea of that horrible version in my mind. As long as I was running from who I didn’t want to be, that person would always be chasing after me.

A new perspective is slowly percolating to the top of my mind. Before my 19 year old self reached the realization that being gay was nothing that needed to be fixed I had to go through a very painful process of killing the future version of myself that I thought I wanted.

Goodbye anti-gay Republican politician who resigns in disgrace after people find out he was having an affair with his young intern Brandon or Trevor, or something like that. I’m walking down a much better path.

However, without a future to look forward to, my temporal anchor in life was holding me in that painful past. Constantly revisiting the worst things in my mind, memory, and personality, to check if I am further away from them than last time seems like progress, but that constant revisiting also kept those horrible memories alive in me. 

Sadly, we settle for what we are used to even when what we are used to is pain.

-R.H. Sin

Two conjoined epiphanies are arriving in my life simultaneously. The first is that, for so long, I have been pursuing this goal of healing to please others in my life. My inner child, the one afraid of being left alone and bullied for the rest of my life, had been steering the ship at break-neck speed and we were gonna crash if we didn’t change direction. The second is that, after getting rid of who I used to think I wanted to be, I need to create new goals. I need to place a new anchor for my life, one in the future that I can move towards. The kind of person I want to become.

Now to get to that I have to deal with the fear created from the first time. When I thought I knew what I wanted to be and had to about-face to save myself. Obviously I don’t want to go through that experience again and have had lots of internal resistance to any sort of goal setting, or planning. When asked “what do you want?” my inner child would start a whole tantrum. He would say, “I Don’t!” and drop into a sitting meditation that looks more like a belligerent toddler than a Taoist master who has truly attained a state of being desireless. My wants were never supposed to be a priority, only how I can help others.

Only how I can be used by others. 

My inner self rejects the idea that I can actually live for myself, and my own goals, and so I have had to be creative and start where I can.

Fortunately and ironically, as the universe tends to work, I have someone in my life who has been fully steeped into personal development ideology. This person has even successfully dodged the cults of personality that fill the inspirational speaker environment. He has given me some great tools and although I frustrate him with my resistance, I am softly easing myself into it with just simple manifestations and affirmations. Writing down a few “I am” statements. Posting them where I can see then. Reciting them when I think to. Gradually, I’m working up to having a vision board and life plan and goals and all that stuff.

I was so against that world when I met him so at first there was nothing but contention for us there. Positive and uplifting self-development was antithetical to my childhood of shame-driven healing and growth. Self-determination went against all the programming I had received.

One chapter ends and another begins. Having reached this point so far in my healing journey I am repeatedly finding that each step upwards precedes another. Once you start this work of developing and evolving forward you can’t stop. You can’t turn around, you won't let yourself. Once you start removing the blinders you can’t then put them back on and pretend that things can go on as they used to.

So this time, gently, comfortably, and out of my own goodness to myself, I go on to the next mountain. I only wonder how the climbing will feel as I learn how to look forward to the peak instead of scrambling desperately away from the base.

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Lift up anything heavy.
Find a way to make a stranger more comfortable.
Let’s build something better together.

🪨┃🌜┃lunar-lunacy is sort of like a Creekmasons group art project! It’s meant to be a place where anyone who wants to make art can come up with things together. It’s especially geared toward those aspiring to become Adeptus Makers (Creatives who are published by the Content Collective), but we’d love to see you sign up even if you have no desire to ever have your work shared publicly.

This is a mini-oasis in a cultural wasteland where you can earn rep, share and receive feedback, and build connection.

Join the Discord to Participate!

A like ❤️ and a share 🔁 are super welcome as well. Perhaps you know a Liminal Trickster Mystic out there somewhere who is just dying to become a word wielding Lunatic? Send them our way!

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LuxuryComfortPleasure

Mason: Colin Reinagel
Find out more at: Weird Life Studios

Colin’s commentary:

I got an AI edited picture that I took its sort of related — it’s of my pool, hot tub, and fire pit taken through a wine glass. I used AI to remove my hand.

It says that LuxuryComfortPleasure could be a trap to me. The fiery refraction through the wineglass could represent the portal into darkness that you can fall into if you spend too much time pursuing luxury, sitting in comfort, or burning out pleasure receptors, but I did take the image as an act of pleasure while enjoying comfort and luxury.

Unrelatable

Mason:
Find more right here!

We spend a lot of time 

telling ourselves stories 

about why we deserve 

this abundance. Hint:

We don’t. Most of the 

stories are pretty humble: 

luck, privilege, accidents 

of birth. At the same time, 

We sometimes also feel

The pull toward tentative 

prodding at our historically

flagging self esteem. Maybe 

the luck would’ve meant 

nothing without hard work 

(though of course the hard 

work would’ve meant nothing 

without the luck.) Maybe our 

neuroses balance the other’s: 

I have Swords and Cups on lock, 

she has Pentacles and Wands; 

I have sporadic bursts of 

creative energy, she has 

reliable, undeniable grit; 

I tactfully ask for what I want, 

she knows how to make 

herself receptive… and 

her patience often pays off. 

And I—in secret—spend 

a lot of time wondering 

whether simply believing 

that the money portal is 

popped open is enough. 

I wonder whether tipping 

33% on every bill inspires 

reality’s reciprocity reflex.

I wonder whether piercing 

others with my pointy aura, 

when invited, is beneficial

enough to them to earn 

good karma in return. Whether, 

like a sadhu, the universe 

can be generous because 

I’m seeking union with source. 

But mostly, I just spend time 

feeling guilty about privilege. 

The stories are only a poultice 

for the wound of separation. 

Why do I deserve to have enough 

when some of my best friends 

and closest relatives and 

human brothers and sisters 

are starving and homeless? 

I don’t. It’s as simple as that.

My Job

Mason:
My Job

I pledge allegiance

To this boob

That I touch each time I say this

And how it could but doesn’t feed

The milk of this wanton desire

To Survive, Reach, even Flourish

One way

Or another

Under the hapless waning of my moon.

This invocation in defiance, I learned at 19.

Washing carrots,

Discharged at last to my own volition,

Plucking them from a cold vat downstairs

Bagging the good ones, taking home the broken

One hour at a time until the rent was paid.

Cutting free the outer strings of my wallet,

I found etched in its bare linings

Preludes to this necessary neglect

Writs to this dark delve of dissent

fused into the skin.

Money still casts orange to me.

Hues of such dark rooted indignity

Time still takes its present shape in relation

To how grudgingly it passed at the vat.

***

Could I father this hapless babe to heart

Anew and commend new vows to kin

I would advise balms made specifically

For the working wounds within.

Calendula drops at the umbilicus,

This human holy memory hole

of interpenetrating nourishment,

Comfrey salve anoints these lips,

Where a latching on that could never last

Gives way in grace to moue

Mint and Chamomile steaming in the air,

Countering this urge to go gladiator

When sidling steps will do.

Yarrow, Mugwort, and Lavendar oil

slip from loin to bended knee

Ferrying dreams, uncoiling springs.

Lastly I would scent my dollars

In Rose, unguent to my care woven transition

Back to my Generous Moon

Want your writing or artwork featured here? Join the Discord! We’d love to have more Lunar Lunatics!

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I’m having this consistent “Social Anxiety” experience with my in-person hangouts that is pretty uncomfortable.

The story I’m telling myself goes like this: at the very beginning of hanging out, I’m so excited to be liberated from my work-from-home isolation that my body is flooded with serotonin and oxytocin. I’m confident, chatty, and excitable and people seem to enjoy my jokes.

Then, some time towards the end of hanging out, some moment of awkwardness causes me to plummet into anxiety. 

That ambient icy fear feels like the hangover or withdrawal from my surge of happy connection chemicals. Stewing in it on the trip home, I’ll make all these connections between half-remembered examples of the body language or subtle word choices or whatever of the people I just left. This string of anxieties coalesces into a paranoid narrative about how I’m totally unlovable and they hated being around me the whole time.

I think my only option is exposure therapy, but it’s already incredibly challenging to engineer situations where I’m around people in-person, thanks to the orientation toward isolation of the—especially post-plague—suburbs. I don’t have friends in meatspace anymore. I don’t even have hobbies that engage my meat.

It’s so painful to be alone all the time… but I’m scared of crowds. It’s as if school bullies, terrorism, mass shootings, and the plague have crammed me, nervous, ever more tightly into a lonely home office bubble. 

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Is this fear and distrust the new normal? Do I have to resign myself to VR hangouts and nothing but ChatGPT for company?

It’d be easier if I was a misanthrope. At the beginning of covid I was excited by the relief from social obligations. Now, I feel like I’m lacking a basic nutrient my soul needs to thrive.

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael introduced me to the argument that Genesis captures this predicament in metaphor. Before we developed the ability to name the animals and evaluate their benefit or harm to humanity, we ate freely. Governed by intuition and instinct that evolved in order to create symbiosis with our environment, we felt supported by our surroundings in return. 

Gathering lunch didn’t demand the “sweat of our brow” until we got the knowledge of good and evil that condones pesticides for “evil” beings, those that have no utility value to humans. However, as Charles Eisenstein points out in his book, Climate, we’ve often been wrong about the impact on complex systems that needed those “pests” to function. 

We have hobbled ourselves.

Limping on legs flayed of their endangered flora and fauna, our environment no longer seems like an ally. Instead, we sense something essential has been removed and the dominoes are collapsing. We struggle like cut flowers: safe in vases but lacking soil, we’re waiting to die. 

The same way I am separated from my ecosystem by my culture’s murderous opposition to any being that isn’t food, I am separated from my neighbors by intricate social rules. Faux pa, shame and taboo and the anxiety and self-aversion that marks my inevitably inept noncompliance with them. 

How could I have been trained to assimilate in the context of my suburban culture’s emphasis on bootstrapping self-reliance by individuals or by their atomic family unit? Why would I have desired to assimilate with a civilization that produces so much self-aversion in its constituents that they become bullies, terrorists, and mass-shooters? 

As if propelled by a flywheel we’ve all long ago abandoned any hope of slowing down, social media algorithm’s prioritize content that makes our neighbors even scarier. Those alt-reich anti-maskers are out to get you. Those satanic pedophiles know where you live. Those fascists. Those Others.

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Every trauma forces us further into isolation. 

I feel more and more fear of my neighbors. And through their fear of me, I develop more and more aversion to myself. Shame that occasionally flirts with the designation “self-hatred” and that always tilts me more toward hiding.

Is this the addict’s rock bottom?

Are you experiencing a moment of clarity, too?

I’m identifying these patterns for the first time, the novelty of re-entering social spaces spurring a fresh curiosity and mindfulness. This is my first apprehension of these loops of social anxiety and frustration. Do you also feel the hype of connection and the terror of connection’s withdrawal? 

Absent experiences of our fundamental unity—outside of liminal spaces like concerts and psychedelic trips—we grow up believing we’re unlovable. At the risk of invoking a just-so evolutionary psychology story, my anarchoprimitivist parts fantasize about the Dunbar’s Number -sized tribe I evolved to inhabit. In a tribe that was more interdependent, I’d have to have a deeper, felt sense of interbeing.

If my neighbor helped six year old me with the scraped knee I got outside their house, maybe I’d feel supported by my community. Maybe I’d have gotten the message, therefore, that I’m worthy of support. Would I experience that ability to rely on my neighbors as love? Could I, then, know myself as lovable?

Could I love myself?

And what would change if I did? If we all did.

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Secure in the belief that I would be accepted lovingly by my community, I’d feel less desire to hide behind the walls of my home-office, the metal and glass of the bubble on wheels I chug down the highway in, or the AirPod barrier between me and the dog park. 

Fundamentally, it’s true. There are no separate things. There are only separate ideas of things. Concept clouds with borders so fuzzy they often dissolve completely on close examination.

Forgive my language addled brain, though, because the way I see it, a complex self-reinforcing system can be partially delineated: the myth of separation causes fractured communities, which cause a deficit of self-love, which feed back into the isolation in our communities. That isolation creates social and emotional distancing, which cause fear of the Other, which creates the conditions for violence, which feeds back into fear, isolation, and separation. 

And what is occluded by fear, isolation and separation? Love.

Is it time yet? Has the Aquarian Age begun? I want to be able to go to children’s birthday parties without obsessive self-recrimination. I want the high of connection without connection’s withdrawal. Can we know ourselves as one? Seriously. Are we there, yet? 

God, Geoff. Just shut the fuck up, already, you whiny, embarrassing hippy.

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Please join me in welcoming to the deeper mysteries of the Creek!

He was recently voted to become the newest Adeptus Maker by the patrons of this publication, through a poll on our Discord server.

As an Adeptus Maker, he has pledged commitment to a number of Arts and Services for the Creekmasons (for instance, writing blog entries around once a month and editing the Nodes in the Net podcast!)

Before I share the essay he submitted along with his petition to matriculate, I want to share a little myth that I can’t get out of my head.

This is the latest conception of the purpose of our Anarcho-Indie Publishing Collective slash Digital Sangha. We are meant to be a refuge for those forced into a liminal territory, yet who still want to Love and be loved and Be Love.

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The Liminal Swamp, by

There’s this Other living out in the swamp on the very edge of town. A weirdo, both proud to claim what sets him apart from the crowd and perturbed by intermittent wishes for a home closer to Main Street.

The kids dare each other to ring his doorbell. There are rumors he has a pet alligator and that he can tell the future by throwing chicken bones into a cast iron pot. And yes. A piece of his mystical mystique is warranted: his home is filled with ancient books and his day with ancient rituals. He’s not bad or scary though, just different. Just wounded. 

Still, when it’s harvest time, he shows up to help, like anyone else. 

Living in the swamp—that liminal zone, neither land nor water, neither in the community nor totally banished—gives this Other a unique perspective that could be called wisdom. 

Some villagers swear the bundled wheat they haul in from the field feels a little bit lighter after talking to him. They feel a little lighter. Just when he’s around.

In the strange territory of the swamp, there’s wild plants and endless time for reflection. Let’s just say it: he’s out there doing ayahuasca. He’s doing his daily meditation. He’s doing his scribbling—pamphlets, manifestos and whole tomes of his own that he hopes will vibe-shift the City Center enough that the fires he can see raging from his liminal home won’t engulf his loved ones in town. Art that might resonate the mainstream such that a spiritual specialist like him can belong in it. 

He’s doing all this mystical, transcendent work. But in helping with the harvest, he’s also “doing the dishes.” He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty for the good of all. He’s not afraid to compromise.

What makes this possible? Why isn’t he hysterical, raving, mad? Squandering his mind like the best of Ginsberg’s generation? Why haven’t his social skills completely atrophied?

What empowers him to be a householder mystic, still merrily belonging in the community he lives on the fringes of? How is he managing to avoid becoming an ever more radicalized and disenfranchised hermit? Why do the wounds that he journeyed into the swamp to heal in the first place not overwhelm him, making him bitter and misanthropic?

His swamp, it turns out, is on the very edge of the boarders of several little villages. Also some towns. Some counties. Even a city or two.

At the intersection of all these outskirts is this special liminal place.

There are witches and hermits. Enby astromages. Shamans. Creeps. Mystics. 

Creekmasons.

Each one a householder. 

Providing each other a sangha. Providing comfort, companionship, compassion, and support toward both seeking transcendent liberation and seeking to remain a valued contributor to the goings on around Main Street.

In a word, providing Love. That bright vibratory resonance that unlocks each Creekmason’s Love of themself, in turn unlocking the welcoming Love of Main Street.

Like a thousand fires liminal to a thousand places. Each fire burns brighter as a result of finally finding art that resonates with their authentic experience, finding their tribe. Learning how to Seek and how to Find and how to Thrive embedded in the kindling… and the fires grow locally and ignite the world.

Vibe shifting the planet through interior work, alchemical art, and the art of conscious being. 

Doing ayahuasca and the dishes

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Let’s take a look at Christ-Like Suffering next. The following essay was submitted by as a part of his admission to the Adeptus Maker (participatory and publishing) rank of the Creekmasons.

Viewed through the lens of the myth we just explored, this was his reason for fleeing to the swamp in the first place. This is the backstory that makes him an Other, afraid to Be Love.

If he can heal this, transmute this, learn to love even through this suffering… I, , believe that his infinitely courageous alchemy will flare up all of our fires so we burn the brighter.

His suffering uniquely qualifies him to build in the Liminal. To build a digital sangha. A home for those hurt people who want to heal, and through our healing, help the world.

Here’s Colin Reinagel.

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Christ-like Suffering by

Alchemizing Abuses of Homophobia, Pedophilia and the Church

As a child I was taught about the suffering of Christ. How by suffering unjustly, he was able to cleanse the sins of mankind; taking them upon himself. That by doing so with grace and love he could clear karma or break cycles or release blocked energy from the collective of humanity or whatever metaphor you want to use for the change Jesus made on the cross and through his resurrection. I wanted to do that. Thatidealistic child believed that the greatest nobility was to take on the suffering of others and heal it personally on behalf of the collective. Maybe I could be a microcosm of Christ’s example. Today my beliefs on inner divinity and the fractal nature of God leave little doubt that my life exists as an expression of divinity; however my ideas at the time were much more grounded in the real benefits I could create if maybe I could heal some collective traumas. Although I had no idea what I would be getting myself into. 

“Be careful what you wish for” is much more than just an expression.

When I was 9 years-old, I started puberty, and my parent’s discovered that I was gay. My dad told me first that he felt similar feelings as a child but that they went away. He then had me write a series of essays based on passages of the bible he selected so that the belief that homosexuality was against God was thoroughly ingrained. This was the closest thing to a "birds and bees'' talk I would ever get from my parents. 

At age 10 I left the school/church I’d been attending and I began public school. At the same time the new church hired a new youth pastor. He told the church about emigrating from South Africa and among other things how he "overcame his sins of same sex attraction through the power of God." Then he offered to work one on one with any of the youth in the church who were going through similar struggles. Well obviously my parents thought their prayers were answered because they asked him to start on Monday first thing after school.

I knew from the moment I saw him that he was a predator. In my eyes he had the look of a hungry lion–I just wish I could’ve said then how accurate my impression was. For the next five months of my life every week for two to three hours a day I would be struggling to breathe and learning to suppress my gag reflex during these "conversion therapy sessions." 

He was angry. Violent. And exceptional at manipulation trying so many lies and tactics, but I resisted and refused to submit through it all. Always lining up insults, biting, hiding, and otherwise doing everything I could think of. Since my parents refused to call off the sessions I could at least make it as unpleasant as possible for him, when I wasn’t simply watching from the other side of the room and obscuring my own face so that I could pretend it wasn’t happening to me.

I couldn’t possibly have told them what was actually happening. When you learn about sex from a rapist and not your parents you don’t have the language to say what’s happening. Worse, I would begin re-experiencing it whenever I tried to think about it… You can't talk while you’re choking. Then I couldn’t answer when my parents asked what was happening and why I felt like I was choking. Ultimately I stopped resisting the gentle blackness, and I wouldn’t allow myself to know what had happened to me until 9 years later while violently baked and holding a pelvis opening yoga pose for about 15 minutes. For of the repressed years I was directing the negative energy of trauma and pain towards myself and my sexuality.

I was a child with a dark and horrible secret, but I just told everyone that my dark and horrible secret was that I was gay, and it wasn’t long before I was telling myself that too. The first step that I needed to overcome was the fear of eternal torment in Hell, since I already had a pretty good idea of what that would be like.

All of this came to light in my family about four years ago, just two years after I finally turned the corner on accepting myself as homosexual.

We were all sitting around on couches in my parents’ home for Christmas when someone offhandedly mentioned his name. That night after everyone was asleep, I woke up with a painful erection and massive nausea. I vomited for about half-an-hour straight until there was nothing left in my entire GI tract. Then, again, a few weeks after I returned home. Only then was I able to admit to myself what had actually happened. It would be another couple of months before telling my family. 

The first thing my father asked me in person was if being raped was what made me gay. Even though I’m tempted to be furious at him for that I just feel sorry for the guy. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was more concerned about his own history and his own “struggles” with “same-sex attraction.” I had to remind him that I was only in the situation because they found out I was gay and did anything they could to try and fix it. That seemed to reassure him that he probably wasn’t attracted to men because he had been raped and was still repressing it.

My mother was the one who took me there from my home, against my wishes. I didn’t have the language to explain why or tell them what was happening but they knew I was miserable, and they knew I didn’t want to go back.  Had they listened to me and respected the autonomy of their child, I would’ve been spared a lot of suffering. I coped by replacing my mother in my mind. A different and unfamiliar woman was responsible for delivering me into this situation, because if it had been my mother I would never have been able to then turn to her for comfort afterwards.

While it was very obvious to me that I would have to grow beyond Christianity to a more whole and integrated philosophy and set of beliefs, it would be easier to make decisions and navigate my relationship with my parents if it was also just as obvious. My parents are not necessarily bad people though, and they were just as much deceived as I was. They’re now comfortable admitting that they do not trust the church the way they did and will not stay at any congregation that openly speaks against homosexuality. In their words, the community is more important and gay people are just looking for that community—same as everyone else. Not that they’ve necessarily changed any of their beliefs but they’ve at least realized that it can be harmful to say those out loud.

What is the larger correlation though, why can I assume that my experience is a greater metaphor to heal cycles out of the whole collective? 

Homophobia, pedophilia, and the Christian church have been a deadly trifecta for some decades now, but it was not always that way… The Old Testament was full of rules, some that are obvious to us now like having your BMs away from your drinking water. Others that are less clear like wearing mixed fabrics or eating pork. Jesus said that he didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it… now, what does that mean? 

For most it means that you follow the laws in the center of the venn diagram of the Old and New Testament but not the rest. Those laws which were, in the late 1950s, retranslated to directly refer to homosexuality. I did my own research though. I learned a little Arameic and a little Greek, the original languages the Old and New Testament were written in, and the more accurate translation is not “men who love men” as is being preached today, but “men who love boys.” The condemnations of pedophilia were removed from the Bible and replaced with condemnations of homosexuality.

Rome was the setting of the New Testament and the home of the churches that Paul wrote his letters to. Those letters form the majority of the New Testament, and so to understand what he meant we have to look at what sexuality in Rome was like. Who were these men who love boys that he was talking about and why would they not be allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven, as he said? 

The Romans did not care about gay or straight–that was largely irrelevant–but when they had an emperor who didn’t have any same-sex action at all, it was out of pattern enough to be recorded in history. What they did care about in Rome was who was the active v.s. receiving partner. Another Emperor was consistently the subject of talk because the ruler should always be on top, but this one was a bottom. Teacher to student, husband to wife, master to slave, any of these were acceptable sexual relationships as long as the power dynamic was expressed through the sex, including underage boys who were effectively women in the eyes of the Romans and their elders. 

They didn’t care about their age, only that they were passive, submissive, and did what they were told. The pedophiles wouldn’t get in trouble—that was openly practiced and accepted. The children would be in trouble if they stood up against it, and so these men who love boys were individuals who abused their positions of authority to create a system that gave them protected permission to take advantage of people. We talk about rape culture today, but we really have no idea how far we have come. 

Fast forward back to the 1900s there had been so many examples of positive and affirming sexuality through the 1800s and even into the early 1900s. “GI becomes Blonde Beauty” was a national headline celebrating a veteran coming out as transgender! But something changed. In the 1940s waves of ideology swept the world and no culture was fully inoculated against fascist groups. Not many people know that the very first place the Nazis went to burn books was at cutting edge health clinics for gender affirming care and research into how to support those we now know of as trangender people, but by the early 60’s anti-gay misinformation and propaganda was in full swing in America, and the western world.

Between the 1950’s and today there has been massive public backlash against homosexuals, transgender people, and the entire LGBT community. The most extreme criticisms of homosexuality in the late 50s and early 60s were coming from the Church and Hollywood. “Boys Beware” was the film that asserted that all homosexuals were pedophiles and rapists. Of course, we are just now learning how these churches and Hollywood executives have used their power to cover up the exact behaviors that they were accusing.

 On the west coast, The Casting Couch was synonymous for movie makers withholding roles for people who are willing to exchange sex for it. In deeper and darker parts of Hollywood child actors and actresses suffered horrible abuse at the hands of their adult directors and producers. Today, there are more people than ever working to expose these shadowed rings of abusers. About Hollywood itself the film “Quiet on Set '' shed light on the abuse. The global sex trafficking industry is revealed in “Sound of Freedom '' by a man who spent years undercover in sting operations, and the abuses described below were brought to the public by “Spotlight” and reporter Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe . 

Within and across dioceses of the Catholic Church priests are relocated and cover stories were created to prevent the public from fully becoming aware of the unimaginable levels of sexual abuse that was happening, all while they continue to spread the messages of homophobia. My experience seems to fit pretty exactly into that slot. Homosexuals experiencing the misplaced violence of pedophiles and rapists, through homophobia and a lack of information.

Now as I enter the 16th anniversary season of those horrifying experiences I've done enough work to begin coming to terms with my shame, and am now in my fourth year of a relationship with my loving and patient boyfriend. It’s been obviously a long, painful, and arduous process but I have found a safe and supporting environment to dedicate myself to this process, but I've begun wondering if I haven't been healing more than just myself. 

Am I suffering like Christ did? 

Have I been carrying more than the weight of my own sins? 

No, I don't claim to be doing what Christ did on the cross by any stretch. I may not be absolving the entirety of human kind, but maybe I've been healing more than just myself. 

Can one man's injury be a greater metaphor in the great scales of the cosmos? Do we believe that a hero can, through their individual tribulation, resolve larger imbalances in the world? If so, does there need to be a linear causation or can the spiritual components of our world carry that deeper meaning outward into larger manifestations? 

At the very least in my own family line, I have reconciled my own father’s repression and pushed through the shame that held him. I still have much work to do before I can say that I have alchemized this pain, but in living my life as honestly, shamelessly, and with as much healing as I am able to take, I believe that I am changing cycles and improving the collective.

 I was introduced to yoga and meditation a couple of years before this happened to me, and these traditions have invariably been a source of progress, and there are many more essays to be written about how I have worked, healed and processed. With every aspect of repressing memories I told myself lies. I set up stages for myself to deal with it level by level. For example I told myself I was 12 when it happened so that I wouldn’t feel as bad about having my puberty ruined before I was even two years in. I told myself that the sodomy never happened and that it was just oral since that felt like it was too much knowledge for me to handle. In so many more ways I hid what I knew from myself. With each of these painful lies came neuroses, anxieties, outbursts, and self destructive impulses I should not have acted on. 

Slowly… layer by layer… habit by habit… reaction by reaction, I am integrating, and resolving.

Needless to say it’s very complicated and I have a lot of work left to do, but I keep working, processing, and growing closer and closer to full honesty and unfettered authenticity. I have a responsibility now. I can only assume that healing from this will be The Great Undertaking of this lifetime, it certainly feels that way for now and if it is truly healing the world of some greater pain then all the work will be worth it.

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Kicking it should be simple. It’s only a weird little hobby.

It’s got stats to memorize like baseball. Arcane and nuanced rules and playbooks that fans can enjoy feeling superior over like Armchair Quarterbacks. Teams to root for viciously like, well, any sport. 

It’s got a collaborative riffing writer’s workshop element in the form of digital hot take meme culture. (And yes, this piece ironically belongs in that category.)

But think about it! People get together, and they talk shop excitedly, and they put their bodies together in meatspace: chanting, synchronizing movement, and feeling alive. 

People buy merch, collect swag, and cosplay. It’s got conventions as highly produced and extra as Comic-Con. 

It’s a hobby. 

It may be one that claims to be the most important hobby there is, but that isn’t really all that materially or spiritually impactful in reality. Let’s admit it.

At most the results of elections are a downstream representation of the systems, cultural currents, attitudes, and mindsets of the ecology of humanity with connections to the spacetime where elections are taking place. Even those who don’t engage in the arguably irrational (unless you’re in a swing state) behavior of voting play a part in deciding results through the chaotic butterfly-to-hurricane causal chain that connects their grumpy supermarket scowls to the ballot box by way of the checkout clerk, that clerk’s partner’s sympathetic shoulder, and that partner’s politically undecided ride or die work bestie.

We talk about laws emboldening people to sink into their worst behaviors, but it’s the chicken and the egg isn’t it? It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The laws follow from the culture. The culture follows from our individual beliefs. And yes, our beliefs are granted social approval when they’re codified in law.

But no president will save us. We can’t right the course of the country by electing just the right leader. That would be like successfully treating the scraped knee of someone who tripped and fell because they’re weak from chemo. It’s a logical typing problem. Caring for the symptom won’t cure the conditions that generated it.

The drunken Silenus, supported by a satyr and a faun, Schelte a Bolswert / After Peter Paul Rubens (Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain dedication)

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After volunteering with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns—knocking on doors, making phone calls, screaming, chanting, and clapping at rallies—I find myself disillusioned. The people whose hobby is politics will tell me that I need to keep up the pressure but some will respect my body’s burnout. At least until they have a chance to point out how much rides on this.

I’m not so sure. 

I’ve heard there’s a playbook for counter-insurgency one of the alphabet agencies carts out to deal with genuinely grassroots protest movements like OWS and BLM. It apparently involves informants, agent provocateurs, harassment and spying. 

I can’t look it up because it’s the exact kind of thing that triggers me. Conspiracy Theory isn’t fun and games for someone whose first Bipolar psychotic break was deeply in progress while on his way to phone-bank for the first time (for President Obama’s re-election). 

So this is just a half-baked hunch based on an article or two that I’ve read from what I swear (yet only half-remember) were legitimate sources. But from my time as a lowly foot soldier and avid hobbyist, my analysis is that the status quo of the political body is a bit like the homeostasis of a human body: it has an immune system that develops antibodies against threats that might destablize it. 

So I believe that democracy is already dead. Or maybe it’s back to the elitist bigoted roots of the founding fathers. Either way, no matter what the hobbyists will say, it isn’t really the only game in town.

There are people whose worldviews I can hardly imagine, who don’t see the world in terms of geopolitical borders and governmental power, like a projection of our brightly colored “political map”-style globes in grade school. 

There are cartels who see criminal turf as true power. The Pope probably thinks more about converts than about countries. The tech and financial elite each view their transnational corporations as the true ground upon which civilization is built and as the halls within which power is distributed and wielded.

So why am I drawn to Twitter when the former President gets shot? Why am I anxiously pouring over the digital toilet stall walls (what Naomi Klein called the comments section in Doppleganger)? What purpose does my obsessive attempted clairsentience—intuiting others’ feelings—by reading the hot takes of Public Intellectuals (fancy influencers) and their chorus of mostly LLM bots? And why can’t I turn away when events like today’s occur? Why do I, someone massively triggered by politics due to a traumatic personal history of mental health struggles, feel compulsively drawn to keep up with current events?

Why do I have a hobby of hurting myself?

The hint is in my obsessive clairsentience. I feel a need for connection. For numerous reasons, I don’t feel safe unless I’ve got my finger on the pulsating rhythm of the vibe. And if that vibe is rotted—bloodthirsty, closed-minded, and opposed to empathy and kindness—I feel compelled to mediate.

There’s been a handful of situations recently where I’ve gotten myself in trouble by advocating for peace and universal human dignity in meatspace conversations about our most polarizing current events. 

Force in defense of life is good and justified, and seeking peace and reconciliation first is generally a good heuristic. It’s a complicated, paradoxical both/and that I’ve found so commonly flattened into the binary of Hitler apologism vs. the infallible ingroup. Nevermind that to get the ideological homogeneity that the ingroup seeks would demand a genocide of political opponents.

I find myself jostling into the middle of the Culture War like the busboy during a bar fight, holding his arms out and saying “c’mon let’s not do this!”

I feel the need to know that violence won’t break out at any minute. I feel responsible for keeping the peace.

But that doesn’t really answer the question, does it? Why do I keep compulsively hurting myself by spelunking into this particular bizarre hobby, even knowing it isn’t truly the only game in town?

The same reason I, an alcoholic, will often pick up the bottle. Some of us just have hobbies of poisoning ourselves.

It’s simple enough: the poison numbs the pain of separation.

I’m six months sober now. The longest since I was fifteen, I’d wager. Back then, I’d often half-jokingly declare “getting shitfaced enough to fall asleep on the neighbor’s lawn” was my Friday goal.

I wanted to get so blasted that I might feel safe around the neighbors I didn’t know and couldn’t trust. Safe the way my eight week old son feels safe falling asleep in the arms of strangers. I wanted a baby’s sense of absolute security, born in their development inability to conceptualize that they are separate from the other beings they encounter.

Babies literally can’t tell that others have their own subjective experience. They don’t even know where the matter of their body begins and ends. They exist with no duality—no separation between self and other.

I want that.

I have multiple hobbies that hurt and that I have so, so much trouble quitting because it doesn’t feel safe to fall asleep anywhere anymore.

Obviously our huge, anonymous societies feel especially unsafe if your identity (or your loved one’s) intersects with one of the classes being targeted by our deplorable bigoted regression.

Still. Putting aside our assumptions about the material truth of these beliefs, we can all empathize that it must be terrifying in our fragmented, untrustworthy world if you have been encouraged to believe your children are in danger of being raped, eaten and sent to Hell eternally through the state-sanctioned brainwashing you can’t protect them from. 

We’re not babies and there’s an advantage: we can adopt others’ perspectives. We can see that from the reality those Others authentically inhabit, everything is absolutely terrifying. Just as it is for us.

Its scary. I’m scared. Are you scared? Catch me scanning your eyes in person or your words on the screen. Are we all scared enough to take peace seriously yet?

It doesn’t work like that. 

Fear doesn’t lead to peace. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with saying “hate can’t drive out hate, only love can do that.” At this point in my life, I keep trying to remember to check out of the energy harvesting that surrounds events like today’s attempted assassination. I can’t be online looking at whether anyone is rioting. 

(I just heard a bang. Someone’s leftover Independence Day fireworks? Fuck. I hope so.)

I have to focus on the baby asleep in my lap, my feet firmly on the floor, and the breath in my chest.

I know who you are in Truth.

I know what you are in Truth.

I know how you serve in Truth.

You are free. You are free. You are free.

~ Paul Selig’s Guides

The action of fear is to claim more fear.

It's hard. It’s hard as fuck. And still, the action of love is to claim the better world our hearts know is possible. 

I’m not commanding you to turn the other cheek, as if I had that authority. Don’t take this to be me callously suggesting you martyr yourself or your loved ones. And if I am called to action, I will endeavor to serve with my hands as well as my Being. It just seems like right now, I serve best by ignoring this harmful hobby and cultivating self-love instead.

Because the solution to feeling scared to sleep anywhere is not the bottle—it’s to love yourself enough to know you belong, wherever you are.

And scrolling the political side of Twitter famously inhibits self-love.

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Bo Burnham employs raw emotional intensity and cheeky irony in an attempt to “heal the world with comedy” in his Netflix special, Inside. For some on TikTok, it might have worked too well, but maybe that was inevitable.

We did need healing, though—the year-and-a-half preceding his special had been traumatic. The alchemical tincture of pandemic, murder, unrest, and—very nearly—civil war, incorporated with a base of ever-present climate despair, intoxicated most of us with a profound sense of derealization and a general dysphoria. 

You don’t need reminding, I know, but to see the headlines laid out in a single sentence—or a single comedy special—helps justify the PTSD we are all experiencing. Inside functions much like the exposure therapy sometimes prescribed by clinical psychologists who treat that disorder.

The special, which was written, directed, performed, and edited by Burnham himself, masterfully weaves a viscerally troubling (mostly fictional) narrative of a sensitive thirty-year-old who spends 2020 locked in a studio apartment, gradually losing his sanity. When I finished it, I immediately pulled out my phone and, when I typed, “Is B,” I was unsurprised to find “Is Bo Burnham OK?” suggested by autofill.

Blending simultaneous sincerity and sarcasm in harmony with the philosophical school of Metamodernism’s take on media, he couches mental-health-devastating global problems in catchy, upbeat techno and sometimes-cheesy jokes.

However, an element of the piece—authentic, if exaggerated, despair—has been co-opted and watered down by a TikTok trend that the company’s algorithm refuses to let me escape. The memes declawing Burnham’s most emotional song, All Eyes on Me, dangerously misrepresent his apparent impetus for performing. They promote a permissive atmosphere toward inaction in the face of the myriad societal problems Burnham sings about.

On the other hand, they also demonstrate that his attempt at exposure therapy worked.

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“Dontcha know the world is built with blood! And genocide! And exploitation!” — “Sock-o”, How the World Works

In a subtle nod to a comedic hero of Burnham’s, the absurdist Hans Teeuwen who often used a similar shtick, Burnham duets How the World Works with a woke gym sock. Satirizing childrens’ shows, the puppet belts a sing-songy tirade against “the global network of capital,” “neo-liberal fascists,” “the pedophilic corporate elite,” and other alleged oppressors. 

Listening to Sock-o’s grievances—which hit the bullseye for many denizens of the internet filter-bubble to which I belong—you get a good sense for what Metamodern philosopher Seth Abrams means by “simultaneous sincerity and sarcasm.” The kid’s show medium and the sprinkling of absurd claims lifts up the heavy, depressing message delivered by Sock-o’s legitimate call-outs.

And if that isn’t enough sugar to help the medicine go down, the song itself is bookended by FaceTime with my Mom (Tonight) and White Woman’s Instagram. Both exude little else besides light-hearted silliness; the former captures the experience of video-calling family during lockdown and the latter takes a somewhat cheap potshot at Influencers’ saccharine cutesiness.

By repeatedly dunking us into uncomfortable truth and then pulling us up for air with relatable or recognizable tropes, Burnham assuages the viewers’ unease. Every interruption to the gasping panic about suffocating under society’s ills pushes the viewer closer to being conditioned out of the reflex.

The whole special ping pongs between provoking anxiety and soothing with humor—sometimes within a single song, other times via juxtaposition in the composition of its setlist. The most poignant example of a message-interrupting wink comes in the show’s final act, though.

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“My current mental health is rapidly approaching an ATL… that’s an All Time Low, not ‘Atlanta’” — All Time Low

All Eyes on Me hit me hard. 

In a voice-changed monologue that makes him sound unsettlingly like Deepthroat, Burnham describes his plan to return to performing after five years of improving his mental health in response to having panic attacks onstage. A plan destroyed by COVID. 

The song crescendoes with repeated commands that would work just as well for a bankrobber as a performer, “Get your fuckin’ hands up. Get on out of your seats. All eyes on me.” Burnham finally violently kicks back his piano bench, grabs the camera and swings it around in front of his face, repeating the refrain—which, no joke, had me questioning whether I should get off the couch—until he seems to completely lose it and thrashes his lighting and recording equipment. The song abruptly ends.

You get the sense that his mental health has been derailed by the project. If it was on LiveLeak instead of Netflix, there were several points during the special I would have been earnestly worried it was a snuff film. But after a smash-cut to black, Burnham pulls us up for air again showing himself brushing his teeth, then eating a bowl of cereal while playing the song’s recording back on his laptop, his legs crossed comfortably.

The special is full of moments like this. After saying the whole special will be shot in the studio’s living area, the very next shot is in the kitchen, establishing that he’s lying very early on. Burnham shows us a sound test that he prefaces with “idea for final song,” before transitioning into the last piece, demonstrating that despite time passing—concretely evidenced by his hair growth—he knew the arc the story would take before he even began.

The message is that he is taking care of himself. The narrative is planned. It’s only performance art. That spliced-in toothbrushing self-care routine breaks the fourth wall to let us know that he—that all of us—can fully embody despair one moment, then let it pass and carry on with life.

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“Don’t overthink this. Look in my eye. Don’t be scared. Don’t be shy. Come on in, the water’s fine… You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit.” — All Eyes on Me

Nearly every lyric has layers of meaning in Inside, but All Eyes on Me is particularly multivalenced. When Burnham tells us not to “overthink this,” he is simultaneously referring to the special itself, his apparent emotional breakdown, and the trauma we’ve all been through in the last 18 months.

To the exact degree that I have clearly failed to not “overthink this” special, TikTok took the invitation and ran with it.

The format of the meme is straightforward, but here’s an example. If you can’t watch a video right now, I’ll break it down: the TikTok user lip syncs, “Don’t be scared. Don’t be shy. Come on in, the water’s fine,” while the caption reads, “Nothing in the Employee Handbook says no Heely Crocs;” then, dressed professionally, he continues to lip sync, “You say the ocean’s rising,” and the caption now says, “HR: It’s unprofessional;” and finally, gliding into the room on his Heelys, he lip syncs “Like I give a shit.”

While some videos retain the song’s pathos, many exhibit a similar level of flippancy. 

They all follow the same pattern: the TikTok user pitches some idea; the same user, from a different camera angle, plays the person being pitched to; we return to the original shot for “like I give a shit.” I’ve seen iterations with everything from hating hiking, to recruiting day-drinking companions, to trying pegging.

The next couple lines in the full recording demonstrate how this glibness subverts the song’s mood: “You say the whole world’s ending? Honey it already did. You’re not gonna slow it—heaven knows you tried.”

By naming our despair, Burnham has given us permission to heal from our trauma. His sarcasm and absurdity soften the exposure therapy, but the sincere parts of the special ask us to wake up to the world’s injustice, to cynical corporate gesturism, and to imminent global collapse. It’s not enough to acknowledge the pain caused by the feeling of powerlessness and move on or go back to normal.

Once you’ve healed from trauma, the next step is to integrate the lessons accompanying the heartbreak and rebuild yourself better.

Inside is good for the first part of that equation, but, distilled for virality, it may not be right for the second part.

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“Latte foam art, tiny pumpkins, fuzzy, comfy socks… is this heaven? Or am I looking at a white woman’s instagram?” — White Woman’s Instagram

Burnham damages his own efficacy as a healer by creating something that can be appreciated on the same level as latte foam art: superficial aesthetics. He wrote some real earworms and zingers. The production is varied and stylish to the point of being surprisingly spectacular for a 90 minute piece shot in his tiny guest house.

Inside manages to visit both poles of potential success: it’s commercial and art at the same time. This metamodern resistance to consistently embodying one side of a binary is necessary to comprehend the work’s implicit call to action. 

If the viewer absorbs only the authentic despair, they will leave depressed. If they focus, instead, on the ironic jokes that’s even worse. Comedy is only tragedy plus time to those whose lives aren’t destroyed; to them, it will just feel like hall pass for strangers who want to be callous. Only by appreciating both the sincerity and the sarcasm can a viewer feel their burden lift just enough to get to work. Unfortunately, the media virus based popular culture does what it does best—ignore nuance—and Inside’s way of passing out permission slips for dickishness may be doing more harm than good.

Burnham shouldn’t be blamed, though; it might be impossible to create something that will be exposed to the attention economy without the algorithms surfacing and popularizing a narrative that is deleterious to the human experience.

It was algorithms on Reddit that helped propagate the toxic masculinity inspired in part by a similarly-surface-level appreciation of Fight Club. 

Identity Politics aims to protect and empower the culturally vulnerable, but algorithms package and sell it as a kind of recursive outrage that Burnham hints at lyrically with “the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.”

Tactics that successfully advertise well-intentioned apps like Headspace promote the degradation of meditating in search of enlightenment to practicing mindfulness so you can be a more productive cog in the machine destroying our planet. 

Neither art nor social movements nor technology is safe from exposure to our profoundly sick society. 

Let’s get outside and fix it.

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