Scraping the Residue off the Antenna

Call it karma, trauma, triggers, or ego… it keeps us from feeling “enough” for Love

It’s a matter of time until the tech elite invent a “cum button.” 

We’ll have our neuralink brain implants splooging dopamine directly into the cortex when we look at ads for Outback Steakhouse. Before we know it, as if our bodies were operated by tiny servo controllers, we’ll find ourselves shoveling coconut shrimp down our ravenous, insatiable throats. 

It’s an inevitability.

Is there a way to prepare?

Hedging my bets, I figure meditation with the objective of burning off karma is the best training for a scenario where awareness of my motivations and ability to sit with my urges is paramount. Thankfully, that’s the scenario whether the world ends, the transhumanists win, or business continues as usual.

By dealing with the subtle yet pervasive thrum of visceral inadequacy endemic to modern society, we can be less vulnerable to these buttons. This inadequacy is a feeling modern civilization can’t seem to quit instigating. The higher a nation’s GDP, the more its citizens get the message we are not enough. Not feeling “enough”—ultimately for the love and connection we’re missing with Source, Collective and Self—is the aching vacuum that turns us into Hungry Ghosts, in the Buddhist sense. 

We eat and eat and eat and never feel sated.

Why?

The message we receive from our upbringings, communities, and institutions is clear. Primarily: we are unworthy of love exactly as we naturally express. We’re trained through the withdrawal of love via the banishment of timeouts, the authoritarianism of spankings, etc. to behave in a “civilized” way. To suppress instincts, intuitions and natural proclivities. Our environment gives us roles to play, telling us to ignore what arises naturally.

The personality self is a synthesis of these roles. A synthesis that we then pretend is us.

The attempt to behave in alignment with our parents’ preferences, our peers’ expectations, and society’s values creates habits of action. That is karma. It’s the baggage that creates a callous. Other people’s ideas of how we should show up in the world, when internalized, are the karmic goop that creates insensitivity to The All’s infinite, unconditional Love. 

A parent tells their crying son to stop being dramatic when the neighbor kid rejects him. His high school friends bring him Midol on Valentine’s Day because his lonely pining for an unrequited crush resembles the whining of someone “on the rag.” Hollywood depicts cold, stoic, logical masculine heroes jaw-punching the bad guy and saving the day.

It’s inevitable that that kid recognizes his role in society is to show up stereotypically, toxically masculine. He develops a mask. A very manly visage to look through and hide behind. And as long as he thinks that mask is him, his connection with his True Self is painfully occluded. 

If our brains operate like antennas, receiving the signal of consciousness from the Soul Field and transforming it into chemicals and electricity that can animate matter in order to interact with three-dimensional reality, that antenna can’t get a clear signal when the requirements of social reality are gunked all over it. 

A sludge of condemnation, shame and rejection coats our receptive faculty. 

Every time a parent chastises their child into behaving in a socially approved way, that child builds an ego characteristic that internalizes the criticism so that they can continue to behave how they’re told even when the parent isn’t around. Each of us has a shaming, nagging caregiver in our brain. That’s no one’s fault. Part of the role of a parent is to help their child navigate the real world and behave in acceptable, polite, civilized ways. It’s how we avoid consequences for deviant behavior like prison and poverty.

And still, that acculturation process creates an Ego. An Ego that obscures our knowledge of our True Self. No one gets through childhood unscathed.

We end up carrying these parts with us that shame us into behaving in the ways that we’re told are acceptable. However, there is a deeper self that wishes to express exactly as it is. 

That Self knows itself as Loved. 

That Self is attuned to the universal truth that Love is all there is. 

The Karmic and Egoic accumulations that accompany incarnation into Form habituate us toward ignoring and obfuscating its signals. 

So the small self, the Ego self, the personality self—whatever you want to call it—finds ways to make up for the disconnection from the eternal Love of The All, of which the True Self is a single wiggling digit poked into the material realm. 

This is why we have addiction.

When I was a teenager, I used to joke that my objective was to get drunk enough to sleep anywhere. The neighbor’s lawn. A stranger’s couch. A bus stop. 

What I was really after was the sense of belonging so thorough that I believed I’d be safe to completely let my guard down wherever I was. I think some version of that dragon is behind how every addiction starts. That perfect buzz is an obviously dangerous simulacrum of the signal of Belonging I can no longer sense because my meat antenna is covered in karmic residue.

So what do we do about it?

You Gotta Cleanse your Meat Antenna

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It’s important to call out that reconnecting with The All doesn’t require us to “earn” enlightenment.

That former pursuit is the trap of perfectionism: the perfectionist believes that if they perfectly control every detail and create the perfect product, project or self, they’ll be worthy of love. 

Eastern wisdom traditions tell us that it isn’t about “earning” enlightenment, but letting go of the limitations that prevent us from bathing in the effervescent lovingawareness of The All that It can’t help but naturally emit. We don’t build a ladder to heaven—we strip off the veil that is obscuring the knowledge that heaven is exactly where we are. In the present moment. There’s nowhere else it could be. 

So the meat antenna needs a cleanse. 

There are a lot of practices that promise to burn off karma—in other words, to help heal from the inevitable trauma of being brought up to fit into a soulless society that monetizes alienation. The one’s I’ve been studying include:

• The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
• Samatha Vipassana Meditation.
• Pranayama.
• Shadow Work.

And then there’s a kind of Grist for the Mill style New Age attitude where you use the upsurges of powerful emotions as an alarm clock that reminds you to engage in Somatic Meditation. 

Somatic Meditation? Basically “feeling your feelings.” I’m getting untold value from waking up in moments of intense outrage, anxiety, despair, or shame to the reality of those physical sensations in my body. Then I just watch the sensations and resist the urge to do anything about them, like scroll through TikTok, have a drink, or fish for compliments.

All of these processes take effort. 

In order to escape attachment, you need a method. (Unless you’re Eckhart Tolle and spontaneously wake up on a park bench in the middle of the worst moment of your life.) Releasing attachment requires a paradoxical attachment to a specific method until you can finally let go of the method entirely. 

And apparently, through that final act of letting go, we remember oneness with Source, experience connection to The All, and arrive at an end to dukkha—an end to suffering.

It’s similar to tuning an instrument. A little muscle is required to twist the tuning knob, but each adjustment improves the quality of the chord. Taking this approach to the mental antenna, through these contemplative practices we become more “attuned” to the subtleties of our inner world and more receptive to the wisdom of the universe. 

We start to recognize that the signal of The All has always been there, pulsating with the rhythm of unconditional love and profound belonging. Again, our task is not to create this signal but to remove the obstacles that impede its clarity.

Scraping the residue off the antenna requires both effort and surrender

So we’ve established that enlightenment is more of a posture of receptivity to the Universe’s eternal lovingawareness, rather than, for example, a grace that you earn through overcoming your baser nature. 

It’s not so much about shaming yourself into purity to overcome Original Sin. It’s more about ducking under the smokey haze that obscures an experiential understanding of the true nature of the present moment.

It sounds like the way to achieve this awakening would be to just relax into it, right?

It’s a paradox: You have to do nothing in order to achieve awakening. “Do nothing” and “achieve” in the same sentence create a disharmony in the ear of the average American and in many cases I’ve seen, the novelty of that discordant note is so alluring that it gets mistaken for ultimate wisdom.

But it’s not quite that simple. 

Instead, consider that in order to duck under the smoke—the mental modifications of reality that distort your perception—you have to maintain a certain posture of mind.

Practitioners of martial arts and more than a few movie buffs will be familiar with “Horse Stance.” Legs wider than hip width apart, you squat into a very stable posture. It’s what Aang used in The Last Airbender when he was Earthbending. 

It’s a tricky stance to hold, and requires a good deal of physical strength to rest into for long periods of time.

So we do our exercises. We incept a sense of security into our own subconscious via visualization and prayer. We return to the breath over and over again. We relax our minds through alternate nostril breathing. We learn to love the darker sides of our personality and transmute lead into gold. 

Over and over we do these exercises. And yes, our legs are getting stronger from squatting down and thrusting upward to shake off the trauma, conditioning and ego—baggage encumbering us like weighted blankets that make holding Horse Stance difficult. Our legs get stronger with every squat and we become more familiar with the truer perspective down below the level of the smoke, but ultimately, what allows us to stay there for longer and longer is that we’re simply letting go of the extra weights.

I’ve been listening to way too much Ram Dass lately. I hope you’ll all forgive this extremely woo article. A bit less of a bridge than I accustomed to traditionally writing about. But I think this is a valuable insight that I’ve arrived at listening to his lectures: 

Enlightenment is a stance of receptivity that some practice might help a person to consistently hold.

It’s a way of relating to what’s already there. 

It appears it’s not a state you achieve. It’s a posture you gently hold.