Reifying the Liminal and Seeking “Fine”

Through cultivating comfort in a world with no definitives, the Creekmasons power a collective.

There's more than one answer to these questions

Pointing me in a crooked line

And the less I seek my source for some definitive

Closer I am to fine

From “Closer to Fine” by Indigo Girls

There goes Indigo Girls, prophesying—the same year I was born—the need to reify the liminal. The need to build while ping ponging between uncertainties, spectrums and fractals, in a metamodern world where every netizen is blasted by their own targeted “firehouse of falsehood.”

Join me at the Creekmasons’ origin, nearly half-way back to when that song was written. Around the time I graduated high school. See me: pants rolled, the prospect of building a bridge of stones across my suburban creek in order to keep my shoes dry long since abandoned. 

Wet silt expressing from my soaked socks through the base of my Adidas’s tongues. The shoes noisily squelching with every step on the creekbank in search of rocks big enough to throw into the water at the end of my half-finished bridge-turned-dam.

This was my first experience reifying the liminal. 

Literally building on the line between the near shore and the far. 

Heraclitis said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” On a subconscious, symbolic level, that stoney dam I impulsively decided to construct was almost akin to an attempt to crystalize the river so that I could step in the same water any time I wanted.

It was really just me carelessly at play, liberated from high school and enjoying an unemployed summer before college. But come on. Isn’t the bildungsroman trope a little too on the nose? A teenager goofing off builds a dam as if he could freeze the creek, and with it, the passage of time. On some deep level, isn’t he hoping to forestall his inevitable march toward embodying the jaded, cynical, sell-out every grown-up becomes?

That’s another liminal zone I was trying to bridge—or maybe dam—the one between childhood and adulthood.

I learned quickly, however, that there were consequences to trying to construct a trap for one of nature’s flows.

The water didn’t stop when I finished my little rock edifice. It just raised. It flooded the creek banks for a bit. Soon its constant force caused trash and leaves to pile up. Eventually, like putting your thumb on the garden hose, the creek’s flow seemed angered by the obstruction and swept gravel from beneath my dam, causing its rocks to topple over.

The energy of the Liminal can’t be contained. 

Similarly, in order for an ecosystem to function, it can’t stagnate. A subculture or a community, especially one composed of Liminal Trickster Mystics, can’t just be frozen in amber when things start getting good.

In order for The Creekmasons to thrive, we need a constant, circular flow of energy. Tyson Yunkaporta tells the story on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast of how you can stop a dust devil—one of those mini-tornadoes that start spinning when the wind hits an alcove just right—by throwing a stick into it. Doing so, you disrupt the whirlwind’s circularity and it evaporates.

His point is that we’re doing the same thing with the extractive practices of Capitalism. Pulling energy out of closed systems without returning anything of value. Destroying civilization in the process.

This has helped inspire the only path I see for us to ever reify the Liminal Trickster Mystic subculture. It has to be in flux. It derives its strength through individuals within it exploring more established and rigid ideologies, and being naturally pulled away from belonging. 

Our loneliness, anxiety and imposter syndrome can be our strength.

There’s energy in the momentum of that pendulum. There’s vitality in the dukkha of that friction. 

A constant vacillation between belonging and alienation is painful, but not pointless if it’s shared. It’s meaningful. Of true value.

The introspection I’ve watched it produce in each of us on the Creekmason Discord, the lofty pondering, the vulnerability—it all has an emotional charge. A charge that powers the Creekmasons when held together, when empathized with, when reflected and reciprocated.

There’s energy available in vulnerability and energy available in compassion. Connection is what powers the Liminal Trickster Mystic subculture.

So what is the river? What flow are we drawn toward entering and unable to freeze? 

I wonder what you think the answer is. 

From where I stand, there are many flows; many sources of energy that I flirt with, feel the desire to concretize, and inevitably end up watching pour over or demolish my shoddy dams. They all seem to slip away. Liminality is almost like an innate disposition. A framing that I bring to every potential idea.

Many, many, of tributaries that I’d be tempted to generate an attachment to all seem to flow into a single river eventually, though. 

What is it?

Simultaneous awareness that we are both a single jewel in Indra’s Net and the Net in sum. An ability to honor, through our actions, the simultaneous truth that we each have a True Self and that that Self is ultimately an aspect of The All. The truth that we are individuals with semi-permeable, self-selected boundaries, and the truth of anatta—Buddhist No-Self. 

I know many of you reading are like me in this way: our strength is our ability and eagerness to say “both/and” to paradox.

So far, for me, that both/and-ness isn’t really gnosis of two contradictory things in exactly the same moment. It’s more like a rubber-band recoil between two theses with mood as the ferryman. The narratives mood inspires act as the pole he uses to prod our path back and forth across the Styx.

I’d like to make this example more concrete, although further extrapolation is probably bait for yet another essay. 

I’ve identified some ways that this tension shows up in my own life. It isn’t limited to wanting to join podcast cults and being drawn away by cold feet. It isn’t limited to being a radiohead-esque Creep. There’s all these tensions suggested by a spiritual search that can be summed up as a piston pumping between alienation and belonging. 

A piston to build a motor around.

Fix vs Surrender 

How much of my problems are things I genuinely need to put my foot down on? In other words, when should I tactfully exercise my personal sovereignty? In contrast to how much I should demand other people try harder to meet my needs, how much of my pain is the result of me having unhelpful preferences and projections that arise from self-loathing. Would it be better to surrender to every miserable moment, and through my relaxation, eliminate the suffering that arises via the attempted rejection of inevitable pain? 

It’s a question of Yes-And-Ness. 

For every stinging situation, I find myself curiously—or with some anguish—wondering what balance of Divine Feminine receptivity I should strike with Divine Masculine agency. 

Agency seems to be my power as an individual, while receptivity indicates a belief that I belong here in the universe and that it will take care of me.

Me vs We 

This is the whole topic of Duncan Trussell and Raghu Markus’ new audio book, The Movie of Me to the Movie of We, a dialectic that feels like a ten hour, better organized podcast. Its title comes from a Krishna Dass lecture in which the ostensibly enlightened artist suggests that we have the opportunity to shift away from our narrow minded, lonely focus on our own personal narrative, into one of belonging with the whole of humanity.

I can already see an essay forming about the shadow aspects of both the me and the we, something about Lone Gunman and Cultists—those toxic versions of over-investment in your own personal identity or total absorption and dissolution into the ideology of a group. 

But the question is big for me. How much of a loner hermit mystic should I be, and how much should I seek belonging by allowing my ego to fade a bit and accepting my innate oneness with the whole community of humans, of life, of matter.

I can never seem to strike the right balance, and regardless of where on the spectrum I feel at home one day, I’ll inevitably end up sliding to the other side, drawn by my depression or anxiety, by my recuperation or mania. Sometimes I see that for what it is. A chemical equation. A reaction. 

Other times, I’m totally rapt by the narratives they generate and genuinely make the mistake of “believing my thoughts.”

Either way, there is energetic motion involved. Motion that can add Creative fuel to the Creekmason Content Collective through the practice of connection.

self vs Source

That’s self, with a small s. As in, the ego created by consciousness’ expression through physical matter. Or perhaps it's better to say the personality self that results from consciousness—the true building block of the universe—having slowed its vibration into a dense form that materialists mistakenly believe is the ontological primitive: atoms and other “stuff.” 

But whether consciousness is what everything is made of or atoms are, there does seem to be what Nietzsche described as “more wisdom in my body than in my deepest philosophies.” 

How much should I listen to the intuitive wisdom of my body and how much should I prioritize my Higher Self’s directives for my incarnation? Are my embodied desires sacred and worthy of pursuit and manifestation, as occult scholar and Node in the Net, Mitch Horrowitz says? What happens when that is contrasted with what is truly best for my soul’s progression in Alien School?

What if my small “s” self wants to perform a magickal ritual to manifest a shiny new car and the Soul incarnated as me needs to experience class fury about Tesla drivers in order to learn the lessons that will lead it to matriculate from Samsara into the bright, atemporal realm of pure being?

I know, I’ll ponder it on the Creekmason Discord and whether I come to a conclusion or not, I’ll have added energy to the circular economy with my vulnerable uncertainty.

And that, my friend, is how you reify the liminal.

Reifying the Liminal vs Shifting to the “Movie of We”

Duncan Trussell and Raghu Markus make a compelling case in The Movie of Me to the Movie of We that the “we” is where it’s at. It’s the cure for suffering and the liberation from loneliness.

That sounds enticing. It seems to be the general philosophy of Eastern ideology as it has been filtered through and reacted to by the Western individualist capitalist mindset. 

I’m positive there’s a lot of value there. I have no doubt that very many genuinely happy, genuinely enlightened beings are thriving through their dissolved sense of “self” and gentle merger with The All. 

Markus uses a metaphor in that audiobook that can be paraphrased as, “the compassion that emits from nothingness like photons from the sun has got to feel wonderful to channel, for whatever it is that can feel wonderful but that can only be described as nothingness.”

Beautiful.

But what about us Liminal Trickster Mystics? Those householders and part-time seekers who neither want to submit to the abject alienation that modern capitalism promotes, nor jettison our egos entirely. Perhaps I like the little special synthesis of The All that only my personality self can produce, through its unique memories and experiences. Perhaps I want to treasure it, while also, at times, flirting with ineffable oneness.

It seems to me like I’m not the only one out there who is drawn toward belonging—in the universe generally, in any given collective or ideology, or with Source itself—but disallowed by my disposition and affective temperament.

So what’s left for us?

The Creekmasons, that’s what.

It’s a place for contemplation, curiosity, vulnerability and empathy. 

It’s a new model for a community. One modeled after a circular economy not unlike an ecosystem. A deer eats a fruit, it poops the seed, the seed is fertilized by the manure, and a new plant grows. The energy pumped into the system more or less stays in the system and creates abundance: the free lunch that Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden.

By eating at our own restaurant, this is what the Creekmasons produce. Through the intimate connections we’re forging as an online community, we’re producing a home for Liminal Trickster Mystics to feel a little less alone, just as I initially dreamed.

The explosion of projects lately is testament to the abundance cultivated by our comfort exploring a land with no definitives. By listening to each others rants, reading each others poetry, watching each other’s performances, listening to each others podcasts and music, we are reifying the liminal.

And we need to stay our neurotic selves to do it.

And, of course, continue to love all that Weirdness when we recognize it reflected back to us.