Goethe said it best:
“Until you know the secret, ‘die and become’ you will remain forever a stranger on this earth.”
Kinda badass.
Provocative.
More true now than ever.
We have all been tracking the physical toll of Corona as it ricochets around the world, and for anyone whose lives and families have been touched by it those losses are profound and tragic.
But there’s a second wave of loss, orders of magnitude bigger than that, as we start assessing what else is dying around us––routines, recreation, relationships, plans, projects, professions.
Purpose.
It’s all coming undone in the impossible new normal we find ourselves slowly living into.
We’ve written extensively in Stealing Fire and elsewhere about how, at their heart, all ecstatic practices are “death practices.”
🥋Martial arts––you get knocked out or tap out. Death practice.
👁Psychedelics and meditation––you experience ‘ego death’ where the artist formerly known as you disintegrates in front of your eyes. Definitely a death practice.
💕Sexuality––“la petite morte”––the little death after orgasm that wipes the Etch a Sketch clean, if only for a moment. Death practice.
⛷Extreme sports where you kneel to kiss the ground once you’re home safe and sound. Near death practice, nearly every time.
They’re all opportunities for us to practice letting go of what we thought was us, what we assumed was ours. What we took to be certain. And when we survive it––we feel reborn, immortal. As Terrance McKenna so poetically put it, we “leap into the screaming abyss only to find that it’s a feather bed.”
So while Corona doesn’t fit the casual definition of “ecstatic” as something super duper fun, it absolutely fits the technical definition of ex-stasis, ‘any act or practice that takes us out of, or beyond oneself.’ We are living in an ecstatic pandemic.
We get to practice resurrection, like Wendell Berry always said.
We were talking about exactly this last week with our friend David Deida (author of The Way of the Superior Man), and he noted something curious. High level executives and leaders were suddenly reaching out to begin one on one work with him... and unusually, they weren’t folks with whom he had already trained with in person. They were powerful people, controlling large companies and resources, who were suddenly finding themselves rudderless, adrift, as the realities of this new world revealed themselves.
Suddenly, maximizing shareholder value, or reducing cost of goods sold, or posting good numbers for Wall Street were all seeming increasingly hollow, shallow, and besides the point. And once those cards started falling, they all start falling. Nice cars. Country clubs. Trophy houses and spouses. All fucking pointless.
And what they were desperately seeking in David’s counsel wasn’t his business advice (he’s been a reclusive monk for years, so that’s not even his wheelhouse). They were seeking Death Practice. They wanted guidance on how to find balance in the eye of the storm.
But it’s not just CEOs coming undone, it’s all of us. We’ve been increasingly enmeshed in a Peak Influencer/Digital Narcissism “self as selfie” hall of mirrors for some years now, and as entire industries from health insurance to marketing to life coaching reveal themselves to be kinda hollow, the way back to old norms seems increasingly blurry.
The question we’re all facing now (whether we recognize it or not) is how to become a “Twice Born.” Someone who has already faced their fears and met their maker... and now returns to the world fearless, joyful, seeking only to offer their life fully in every moment.
Another dear friend and mentor Jordan Hall, gave us a clue to the way forward. In a call on Monday, he laid it out to our team of operators who have been on the front lines of this epidemic for the past six weeks. As we considered the landscape of crisis and all that needed to be done to keep the world on the rails it felt a bit much. Masks, ventilators, test kits, surveillance, political crisis, food shortages, civil unrest, information warfare...Never ending. Too big. Too much.
And Jordan said (in his typically Spock like way) “the task ahead of us is impossibly large, and therefore impossible to solve with additional, even heroic efforts. It’s like Thor’s Hammer, it is infinitely heavy. It can only be lifted by Thor himself. No amount of effort by the wrong person can budge it. So the only solution is to find your hammer––find what’s yours to do and go and do that. Everything else is wasted effort.”
Bam! Hit me right between the eyes.
In Buddhism it’s the notion of “seek refuge in the Dharma”––or what it is that is uniquely yours to do.
So how do we seek refuge in what’s ours and only ours to do? Where is the eye of the storm as everything around us swirls and churns into chaos?
Let everything die. Your Instagram posts and your curated selfies. Your LinkedIn profiles and your vision board wish list. Your hopes and dreams.
And listen. Listen for that quiet insistent voice reminding you of that long forgotten calling. It could be to plant a garden and host Monarch butterflies. It could be to paint murals, or to teach small children. Or fight fires, or build cathedrals.
It’s impossible to predict from here what the world, and the markets and professional opportunities will be there as we limp out of quarantine. It probably won’t go back to ‘normal,’ whatever that bland term implied. It probably shouldn’t anyways.
But here’s one thing that is certain, from time immemorial: we will always need warriors. We will always need healers. And teachers. And traders. And craftsmen. And farmers. And artists. And musicians. And magicians. And elders. And builders. And leaders.
So if life in late stage capitalist globally hyperconnected supercivilization has left you disconnected from one of those archetypal cultural roles, stuck in a cubicle or hawking your self online, consider who you are deep down and what’s yours to do.
Practice psychoarcheology. Excavate down to the bedrock of your true self.
And go and do it. Seek refuge there, in your Dharma.
Dying.
Becoming.
Swinging your hammer.
And making an almighty dent in the universe.
Jamie
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