Thank you for this, Caitlin. This piece really resonates with me and is very useful. For the past decade or so I've really struggled with this paradox, and it has also made finding community a bit tricky! The spiritual bypass, or the cumulative sink into cynicism and bitterness when you pay attention to the world. It's also a dance between personal action and acceptance.
The personal struggle is my utopian intuition and hope about how things should be, crashing headlong into the reality of so much suffering on this planet, and waking up to find things are WORSE than I thought and definitely not turning into a giant hippy festival, seeing the illusion that things appear fine because some many people are numb and can't care. Now I feel more revolutionary minded, but the conflict and soul heaviness it isn't healthy.
It's good to have a reminder to balance between those things by not being defensive to feeling. My own sense is that we should have a lot of forgiveness for ourselves because the transition to greater feeling and less defensiveness takes a while and is very difficult.
“The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.”
― Laurens van der Post
#2 . . .
A Letter From Beyond the Edge : The Shaman’s Song
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am the bone-dance between birth’s first yell and
Death’s fingersnap.
I am that noise between the skin of my hand and the
One of the fundamental qualities I experience as I grow and expand my awareness is the coexistence of opposites. I grow in the capability to hold opposite realities at the same time. Holding opposite truths at the same time becomes a powerful component of my consciousness.
We make our own reality. Every single one of us. And because we do we have compassion for those who make a harsh reality for themselves. There are moments are “perfect”, when inner meets outer. And moments when perfection isn’t enough if I’m going to move forward. But no moment is “better” than any other moment, no pain that’s worse than some other pain, and no breathtakingly awful time that isn’t full of wonder and growth. That’s my humble fucking opinion anyway.
If we really are making our “own reality”, then clearly the vast majority of us love war, random violence, theft, fraud, poverty, disease, starvation, torture, rape, addiction, shitty jobs, disagreement, anger, worry, envy, petty nastiness, and death. And because it’s me making this reality, I only have myself to blame. Everyone else is blameless. It isn’t the oligarchs or the Davos crowd or whoever runs The Empire who is to blame. And there's no way it could have been a malicious creator god. It turns out, instead, that I’m the sole cosmic asshole who’s made this bad movie.
My my. I don’t know why you’re so hostile, if it’s not something you want to believe then don’t believe it. But I can tell by how you just attacked my idea that in fact you do like war and violence, tho this one was just verbal. But it’s the same impulse. Anybody who says something you don’t like deserves your wrath. You’re like a boy Hillary Clinton. But as long as you traffic in blame instead of cause you’ll have your one finger pointing out at everyone else and 3 fingers pointing back at you. You KNOW that you think poorly of yourself or you wouldn’t be so afraid of my idea that you look at yourself for answers. And please, be sure to the obvious finger joke in response. I await you wit.
I would say, very few of us can make our own reality for more than a few stolen hours a day. Some are born into whatever reality they choose. On my best days I can pretend I am in control of my reality, finding Dark Matter. I wrote a story Dark Matter Zombies where I considered I am Dark Matter ha. From your comments here I would say you have a better grasp of your reality then most of us : )
I love your ideas. And thanks for the compliment, but me too, I can only really do it when I’m in a certain space. I’ve seen people born into awful circumstances who made their reality better by believing they could. Most of them are from Viet Nam in the ‘60’s who practice a deep Buddhism—I wish I were as accomplished as they are. But one element they gave me in my search is that creating my own reality isn’t about gaining control of reality, it’s actually more about letting go of the illusion of control. That’s the probably the hardest part for me. Like that scene in some block buster movie where the guy has to step out into the abyss to make the stepping stone appear beneath his feet! Gawd!
Maybe this is the ideal, but I've definitely had long moments that were just unbearable and extremely hard to stay open to. I could really only redeem them long after the pain was over.
And then the mysterious question: who is the "We" or "I" that actually makes this reality? It's definitely not the voice in my head that I tend to identify with most, and it seems to blur with people and things around me. I can't own it, or even see it much of the time.
[Jean, I'm replying to your original comment here because this new Substack interface won't let me comment to your comment below. Apparently, the number of replies in a thread are now limited.]
First, I thought Patrick Powers’s comment below was excellent, and funny. So I was responding to the idea of “we all make our own reality” rather than responding to you personally. My main point in my comment to Patrick Powers is that we ought to give this increasingly popular “I-make-my-own-reality” notion the amount of critical thought it deserves, because while it may seem innocent enough—even an attractive and hopeful idea—our rulers and owners can and will use it against us.
For example, the pandemic? That had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Fauci’s corruption or Bill Gates’ greed or media spewing the lies of Big Pharma. Nope, that was me; I was just making my own shitty reality. Fauci and Gates and Pfizer have absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for all the death and financial ruin they caused.
The NATO proxy war in Ukraine? That’s just me again making my own reality; it has nothing to do with Victoria Nuland or Blinken or Zelensky or Joe Biden? They didn’t cause it, I did, because I am making my own reality. Or, if I’m homeless, I’m just making my own reality? If I’m poor, I'm just making my own reality? If I’m sick, am I just making my own reality? If I am, that sounds suspiciously like what capitalists and neoliberals tell us at every opportunity--that every bad thing happens because we are lazy, or because we made stupid investments, or because we’re just not ambitious or smart enough. The capitalists are quick to tell us that all bad things happen because we deserve them, because it obviously isn’t the fault of the capitalist system. So, in any tyrannical system, the ruler will just love it if we assume all responsibility for our own reality because that lets the ruler or the elites or other parasites off the hook.
However, just to be safe, if you really are making this reality—if you really are Vishnu dozing on a lily pad and dreaming the world—then how about sending me the numbers for the next Powerball jackpot. Oh, and putting Fauci in prison and ending the War in Ukraine would also be nice, and maybe could you throw a few million votes to RFK, jr. in the next election.
Whatever. As I’ve said before, do what you want. I don’t care if you believe my ideas. I don’t even care if you make fun of them. (Actually, that just tell me more about you and the level of your awareness). But it makes answering you pointless as it seems you’re not open to anything new, you just want to repeat over and over how horrible everyone else is and not look at yourself and how you’re contributing to this horror show by saying it’s out there and not in you.
"He does this with a very simple phrase: he says that as you awaken, that suffering "hurts more, but it bothers you less.""
The reason for this is simple; once awake to the reality of this world one learns that suffering will always exist and we are limited in what we can do about it. But we have to try. i.e. it's a job not a crusade with some utopia outcome.
Like Sysyphus? A friend of mine once said that the best men could ever get to in philosophy was the Absurdist position. Women were too smart for that. I’m starting to wonder….
Jean Wyman: I don't know if life is absurd. That's just like someone's opinion and subjective. I see life for what it is through my own two eyes. Sysyphus was a male.
I recently wrote about “Service” to others as a meditation but also as an act of subversion. Perhaps Ken Wilber would agree. Evoking the “hidden hand of good “ does more than alleviate suffering but it transforms thinking in unknowable ways which in turn causes negative repercussions in the world of the manipulative classes.
"If enough of us can learn to look with both eyes, with both the absolute and the relative perspectives, with both inner and outer consciousness, the bastards will stand no chance. There will be nothing they can do to stop the end of their rule or thwart the creation of a healthy world."
To see the world with both eyes open is the work of the great writers. I think particularly of Dostoyevsky, his entire work, but if I have to point to one book, it would be "The Brothers Karamazov".
Every great book does this: to look as sincerely as possible into ourselves and the world around us. It is sometimes painful, sometimes comforting - when I meet the genius of a great writer, it comforts me -, but in any case, it deepens our humanity.
David Ray Griffin is a stellar example of what Caitlin is talking about. Having devoted most of his working life to process theology, he demonstrated his faith in God (not "Gawd") by seeking the truth about 9/11 and ultimately by seeking -- and finding -- the truth about US imperialism in his last, posthumously published book "America on the Brink: How US Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine" (continuing and expanding the theme of his 2018 "The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?").
A subjective perspective is necessary to care for oneself; an objective perspective is necessary to care for others.
The subjective has supplanted the objective in many ways-the inversion of humanity during COVID, the idea of peace through violence, the understanding of gender, the idea of credential defining education, et alia.
Social extortion via influencers and authoritarians furthers the abandonment of the objective to empower the subjective, leading the unreflective to perceive preference as principle, the power of institutions without the commitment to ideal that inspired the institution.
Subjective is necessary because objective inescapable, but the needs of the few cannot overrule the needs of the many.
Lovely piece, Caitlin 😊 I was lucky enough that my first yoga teacher wasn’t a navel gazing bliss bunny . Her whole point was to make us live life with eyes wide open, to make our practice rooted in social change. Ever since, I seek similar people out in community, in teachers, in friends- people who are committed to doing the work on both sides, and not turning away from the pain or joy of any of it.
Your poem is exquisite and powerful, and I am so grateful that you have shared it with us.
Ken Wilber has been one of the people who have illuminated my life both intellectually and spiritually. I would love to hear from anyone who has heard Wilber speak out about the last three years of atrocities. So many of the people I most admired have been either strangely silent, or have to my dismay bought the lies wholeheartedly. That is one of the most painful realisations. It has inverted my world. I find it hard now even to quote them from the old days, knowing this.
Thanks, Caitlin, for another one of your philosophic gems. This article reminds me of a quote by Dartwill Aquila:
”With eyes wide open you see what is happening.
With your mind wide open you understand why.”
Thank you for this, Caitlin. This piece really resonates with me and is very useful. For the past decade or so I've really struggled with this paradox, and it has also made finding community a bit tricky! The spiritual bypass, or the cumulative sink into cynicism and bitterness when you pay attention to the world. It's also a dance between personal action and acceptance.
The personal struggle is my utopian intuition and hope about how things should be, crashing headlong into the reality of so much suffering on this planet, and waking up to find things are WORSE than I thought and definitely not turning into a giant hippy festival, seeing the illusion that things appear fine because some many people are numb and can't care. Now I feel more revolutionary minded, but the conflict and soul heaviness it isn't healthy.
It's good to have a reminder to balance between those things by not being defensive to feeling. My own sense is that we should have a lot of forgiveness for ourselves because the transition to greater feeling and less defensiveness takes a while and is very difficult.
Thanks for your articulation about finding balanced community. So glad to have these new words for it.
I find this to be quite touching and hope and aspire to be one of those you describe as looking with both eyes.
I think you have clearly made the grade
🙏🏼 always a work in progress
#1 . . .
“The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.”
― Laurens van der Post
#2 . . .
A Letter From Beyond the Edge : The Shaman’s Song
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am the bone-dance between birth’s first yell and
Death’s fingersnap.
I am that noise between the skin of my hand and the
Skin of the drum.
I have sailed over the edge
Of my flat Earth.
I have stepped over my own corpse each
Insurrection of my rebel soul.
At night, I am the he-owl flown to hunt among the
Stones of the moon.
© JSI 2012
Wow
One of the fundamental qualities I experience as I grow and expand my awareness is the coexistence of opposites. I grow in the capability to hold opposite realities at the same time. Holding opposite truths at the same time becomes a powerful component of my consciousness.
We make our own reality. Every single one of us. And because we do we have compassion for those who make a harsh reality for themselves. There are moments are “perfect”, when inner meets outer. And moments when perfection isn’t enough if I’m going to move forward. But no moment is “better” than any other moment, no pain that’s worse than some other pain, and no breathtakingly awful time that isn’t full of wonder and growth. That’s my humble fucking opinion anyway.
We make our own reality? Then I'm not doing a very good job.
If we really are making our “own reality”, then clearly the vast majority of us love war, random violence, theft, fraud, poverty, disease, starvation, torture, rape, addiction, shitty jobs, disagreement, anger, worry, envy, petty nastiness, and death. And because it’s me making this reality, I only have myself to blame. Everyone else is blameless. It isn’t the oligarchs or the Davos crowd or whoever runs The Empire who is to blame. And there's no way it could have been a malicious creator god. It turns out, instead, that I’m the sole cosmic asshole who’s made this bad movie.
Or, wait, maybe it is you.
My my. I don’t know why you’re so hostile, if it’s not something you want to believe then don’t believe it. But I can tell by how you just attacked my idea that in fact you do like war and violence, tho this one was just verbal. But it’s the same impulse. Anybody who says something you don’t like deserves your wrath. You’re like a boy Hillary Clinton. But as long as you traffic in blame instead of cause you’ll have your one finger pointing out at everyone else and 3 fingers pointing back at you. You KNOW that you think poorly of yourself or you wouldn’t be so afraid of my idea that you look at yourself for answers. And please, be sure to the obvious finger joke in response. I await you wit.
what's gender got to do with it?
I would say, very few of us can make our own reality for more than a few stolen hours a day. Some are born into whatever reality they choose. On my best days I can pretend I am in control of my reality, finding Dark Matter. I wrote a story Dark Matter Zombies where I considered I am Dark Matter ha. From your comments here I would say you have a better grasp of your reality then most of us : )
I love your ideas. And thanks for the compliment, but me too, I can only really do it when I’m in a certain space. I’ve seen people born into awful circumstances who made their reality better by believing they could. Most of them are from Viet Nam in the ‘60’s who practice a deep Buddhism—I wish I were as accomplished as they are. But one element they gave me in my search is that creating my own reality isn’t about gaining control of reality, it’s actually more about letting go of the illusion of control. That’s the probably the hardest part for me. Like that scene in some block buster movie where the guy has to step out into the abyss to make the stepping stone appear beneath his feet! Gawd!
Disregard that pap.
Me either sometimes. Most of us aren’t, it seems. But to me it was like learning to cook. The more I worked at it, the better my meals got.
This was meant for Ian, but landed way down here. Sigh.
Maybe this is the ideal, but I've definitely had long moments that were just unbearable and extremely hard to stay open to. I could really only redeem them long after the pain was over.
And then the mysterious question: who is the "We" or "I" that actually makes this reality? It's definitely not the voice in my head that I tend to identify with most, and it seems to blur with people and things around me. I can't own it, or even see it much of the time.
Full marks, Jean. Hard to beat that.
This runs parallel to what I feel I’ve learned most as a parent.
[Jean, I'm replying to your original comment here because this new Substack interface won't let me comment to your comment below. Apparently, the number of replies in a thread are now limited.]
First, I thought Patrick Powers’s comment below was excellent, and funny. So I was responding to the idea of “we all make our own reality” rather than responding to you personally. My main point in my comment to Patrick Powers is that we ought to give this increasingly popular “I-make-my-own-reality” notion the amount of critical thought it deserves, because while it may seem innocent enough—even an attractive and hopeful idea—our rulers and owners can and will use it against us.
For example, the pandemic? That had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Fauci’s corruption or Bill Gates’ greed or media spewing the lies of Big Pharma. Nope, that was me; I was just making my own shitty reality. Fauci and Gates and Pfizer have absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for all the death and financial ruin they caused.
The NATO proxy war in Ukraine? That’s just me again making my own reality; it has nothing to do with Victoria Nuland or Blinken or Zelensky or Joe Biden? They didn’t cause it, I did, because I am making my own reality. Or, if I’m homeless, I’m just making my own reality? If I’m poor, I'm just making my own reality? If I’m sick, am I just making my own reality? If I am, that sounds suspiciously like what capitalists and neoliberals tell us at every opportunity--that every bad thing happens because we are lazy, or because we made stupid investments, or because we’re just not ambitious or smart enough. The capitalists are quick to tell us that all bad things happen because we deserve them, because it obviously isn’t the fault of the capitalist system. So, in any tyrannical system, the ruler will just love it if we assume all responsibility for our own reality because that lets the ruler or the elites or other parasites off the hook.
However, just to be safe, if you really are making this reality—if you really are Vishnu dozing on a lily pad and dreaming the world—then how about sending me the numbers for the next Powerball jackpot. Oh, and putting Fauci in prison and ending the War in Ukraine would also be nice, and maybe could you throw a few million votes to RFK, jr. in the next election.
Whatever. As I’ve said before, do what you want. I don’t care if you believe my ideas. I don’t even care if you make fun of them. (Actually, that just tell me more about you and the level of your awareness). But it makes answering you pointless as it seems you’re not open to anything new, you just want to repeat over and over how horrible everyone else is and not look at yourself and how you’re contributing to this horror show by saying it’s out there and not in you.
Individualize the problem and Blame the victim much?
"for those who make a harsh reality for themselves."
Lol. It’s like looking in a mirror. I said exactly the same thing in my 30’s. But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. BD.
"He does this with a very simple phrase: he says that as you awaken, that suffering "hurts more, but it bothers you less.""
The reason for this is simple; once awake to the reality of this world one learns that suffering will always exist and we are limited in what we can do about it. But we have to try. i.e. it's a job not a crusade with some utopia outcome.
Like Sysyphus? A friend of mine once said that the best men could ever get to in philosophy was the Absurdist position. Women were too smart for that. I’m starting to wonder….
Jean Wyman: I don't know if life is absurd. That's just like someone's opinion and subjective. I see life for what it is through my own two eyes. Sysyphus was a male.
Duh
I recently wrote about “Service” to others as a meditation but also as an act of subversion. Perhaps Ken Wilber would agree. Evoking the “hidden hand of good “ does more than alleviate suffering but it transforms thinking in unknowable ways which in turn causes negative repercussions in the world of the manipulative classes.
"If enough of us can learn to look with both eyes, with both the absolute and the relative perspectives, with both inner and outer consciousness, the bastards will stand no chance. There will be nothing they can do to stop the end of their rule or thwart the creation of a healthy world."
Amen!
To see the world with both eyes open is the work of the great writers. I think particularly of Dostoyevsky, his entire work, but if I have to point to one book, it would be "The Brothers Karamazov".
Every great book does this: to look as sincerely as possible into ourselves and the world around us. It is sometimes painful, sometimes comforting - when I meet the genius of a great writer, it comforts me -, but in any case, it deepens our humanity.
David Ray Griffin is a stellar example of what Caitlin is talking about. Having devoted most of his working life to process theology, he demonstrated his faith in God (not "Gawd") by seeking the truth about 9/11 and ultimately by seeking -- and finding -- the truth about US imperialism in his last, posthumously published book "America on the Brink: How US Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine" (continuing and expanding the theme of his 2018 "The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?").
A subjective perspective is necessary to care for oneself; an objective perspective is necessary to care for others.
The subjective has supplanted the objective in many ways-the inversion of humanity during COVID, the idea of peace through violence, the understanding of gender, the idea of credential defining education, et alia.
Social extortion via influencers and authoritarians furthers the abandonment of the objective to empower the subjective, leading the unreflective to perceive preference as principle, the power of institutions without the commitment to ideal that inspired the institution.
Subjective is necessary because objective inescapable, but the needs of the few cannot overrule the needs of the many.
The potentials for both sides is always there, with both eyes you find a middle path.
Even when life deals you a 💩 hand, making the most of it and finding a different path helps.
great poem Caitlin
Lovely piece, Caitlin 😊 I was lucky enough that my first yoga teacher wasn’t a navel gazing bliss bunny . Her whole point was to make us live life with eyes wide open, to make our practice rooted in social change. Ever since, I seek similar people out in community, in teachers, in friends- people who are committed to doing the work on both sides, and not turning away from the pain or joy of any of it.
Your poem is exquisite and powerful, and I am so grateful that you have shared it with us.
Ken Wilber has been one of the people who have illuminated my life both intellectually and spiritually. I would love to hear from anyone who has heard Wilber speak out about the last three years of atrocities. So many of the people I most admired have been either strangely silent, or have to my dismay bought the lies wholeheartedly. That is one of the most painful realisations. It has inverted my world. I find it hard now even to quote them from the old days, knowing this.