How We Perceive Life Is Completely Wrong (And It's Killing Us)
The winds were howling through the rocky landscape as I clutched my hat tightly to my head, exploring the sandy desert washes and ancient boulders looking for a suitable portal to enact a self-guided ceremony.
I had become everything I mocked. Adorned in a poncho and sandals, beating a deer-hide drum, wading through the desert singing songs of “the universe.”
Not even 5 grams of mushrooms had taken me to this level of hippy.
Normally I would be annoyed by winds this heavy, but today it felt like a passionate kiss from the divine.
This was a novel feeling, and likely a product of the previous 4-days, where I had been delving deep into the nature of psyche and soul with a group of spiritual wanderers and a few soul guides.
In only took me a few days before I started whispering to the cholas and lizards and prickly cacti that littered the desert landscape of Joshua Tree National Park.
I had come here with the Animas Valley Institute to spend five days engaging in what they call Soulcraft- reconnecting with natural world through dialogue, poetry, dance, song and mysticism, in an effort to have an encounter with soul.
If this sounds like some hippy woo-woo shit, I assure you it isn't. This way of living more real than anything we experience in our day-to-day consciousness. As Josh Schrei of The Emerald podcast affirms, Animism is normative consciousness.
For 96% of humanities existence - hundreds of thousands of years - we lived as animists.
The world was not a dead, soul-less place made up of inanimate objects.
It was a world teeming to the brim with aliveness- with soul.
We knelt at the feet of the natural world and understood our tiny existence was part of a much larger, Gaian mythos that was far beyond our comprehension.
The problems we face as individuals - emotionally, spiritually, and even physically, are a product of the reductionist mindset we were indoctrinated into a few hundred years ago.
These issues are echoed on the larger societal stage, too.
Reductionist views have facilitated the destruction of other species, other humans, and the very planet we inhabit.
Like the mystics throughout eons of time have proclaimed: As above, so below.
The pervasive societal illness that victimizes all of us is disconnection.
When we're taught the world can simply be reduced to a set of components like a set of legos, we begin to treat our bodies and all other bodies the same way.
We are spiritually sick - and no pill, powder, or potion will cure this malaise.
We cannot comprehend the pain and suffering that our fellow human and non-humans alike are enduring, because we refuse to be with pain and suffering within our selves.
We would rather get drunk, pop pills, or sedate ourselves with mindless distractions than face the deep chasm of grief that exists in our souls.
A true spiritual path does not have you ascend, transcend, or become immune to such grief. Authentic human growth sensitizes you to the horrors we aer collectively facing.
It begins to hurt more, not less.
The past few years, I have been stricken with a level of grief that of which I cannot explain and that no amount of therapy, men’s groups, breath work, meditations, or retreats can address.
I have done my very best to turn away from confronting this canyon of despair. To numb.
To distract endlessly with by overwhelming my senses with stimulation - food, screens, substances - anything that could take the edge off being with that deep chasm of disconnection.
Even as I write these words, I feel the tears welling up in my ducts - a feeling that has become all too familiar - inexplainable yet undeniable.
It only grows louder in volume and frequency as I apply everything I've been trained in to suppress it.
This grief is not the grief of childhood trauma or failed relationships.
It’s a primordial grief that I imagine my ancestors carried for millennia as they saw the destruction of the very things that tied them to the intricate web of life.
So I went to the desert - not to be fixed, or healed, or develop some part of myself to be a better man.
I came to the desert to make space for the grief.
To give voice to the collective longing we have for connection. To meet other souls at the depths of despair who have no idea what to do with it all.
Who feel the children being uselessly murdered half way around the world. Who feel the wild world becoming increasingly smaller and are old enough to remember a time where things were actually different.
Humans who have the courage to be sensitive enough to feel it all, and now that they do, have no fucking clue what to do with it.
This ancient longing is not something you feel or you don't. It's not a product of being conservative or progressive, whether you believe in climate change or not, or whether you're Buddhist, Christian, Muslim or Atheist.
This longing is part of the core identity of who we are.
You may not be able to articulate it, but you feel it.
This longing is what drives you endlessly to improve your life, or make more money, travel more places, buy more shit.
It is this longing that drives us away from the real and into the synthetic.
This excruciating longing is what manifests depression, anxiety, anger, apathy, addiction, suicide, and anything else we take on to either numb it all out or use to feel something - anything - else but this despair.
Because there is no longing without grief.
To yearn for the way it was, or way it could be.
To return to something we know intuitively know is more natural and pure.
To come home to our innate innocence.
These aren't childish dreams.
This is an intuitive knowing that we've veered far, very far, down the wrong path and we have no idea where to go from here.
We are lost. All of us.
We would rather destroy ourselves and everything around us than be with the weight of our reality.
There isn't one symptom of our diseased state as a global civilization that does not lead back to this ancient longing, this primordial grief.
It transcends cultures, religions, ethnicities, and genders.
In fact, it's the reason we differentiate.
These Feeble attempts to find our own way through the world by drawing the line between "us" and "them” provides us just enough delusional comfort and righteousness to get us through life.
Obviously the antidote to this grief is not by becoming better or accumulating more shit. We all know that.
The antidote to the disconnection is obvious- connection.
Specifically, connection to the world beyond what we’ve been trained to see.
Connection to the sun and the moon.
Connection to the mountain and the sea.
Connection to the rock and the tree and the plant.
To awaken eros - the erotic nature of life.
To be impassioned and seduced by life itself.
There is something deeply pleasurable about the smell of the budding pines in the springs, or how a flower in bloom presents its sexual organs like an inviting woman, or the way the wind, water, and sun can tantalize our senses on a beautiful Summer day.
This is connection.
To be in communion and understand that spirit (or mystery, God, or whatever you want to call it) runs through everything.
There are no inanimate objects.
This level of consciousness was the way the world was for nearly everyone that came before you.
Encoded in your DNA is the understanding that everything on this planet is a living, breathing, yearning being.
If this was the lense you saw the world through, how could you ever be alone?
How could you destroy, kill, and take without feeling the need to reciprocate?
What would change in your relationship to money, success, and getting your slice of the pie?
Would any of that shit even matter?
If you think getting to this state of consciousness is a stretch from where you are right now - I assure you it's not.
It took me a couple days in the desert - away from screens and the trappings of modernity - to begin feeling the presence of a living, breathing, sentient world.
To hear the song of the ancients rattle through my bones and awaken my primal instincts.
To converse with the sun and the stars and the moon.
It’s a frequency that is already/always available.
This is our normative consciousness.
Every other worldview is a poor adaptation that we experimenting with, and it is killing us.
Animistic consciousness, when embraced, feels familiar - because it is.
And when we understand this it the way we’re were meant to see the world, we begin to settle.
Our body begins reorients to its original patterning.
We don't become better.
We don't miraculously heal.
We take the first step towards authentic wholeness.
We welcome the grief and joy, and begin to feel at home in the larger mythos of the world.
We belong, and finally begin to live into the grand story as awake, live, and whole human beings.