[part 1]
capitalism functions off of competition and designed scarcity, this is why real wisdom isnt profitable.
this is also why you have cults, groups and factions constantly jockeying for control in a capitalistic frame. social media has only highlighted this aspect of human nature: competing narratives striving for dominance of the social narrative. the only war is a meme war against the imagination. (hat tip diane di prima)
wisdom would allow a person to sense in multiple simultaneous ways, with no real addictions to any extreme bias. wisdom would also allow patience, humor, agreement and disagreement to co exist simultaneously in the soma of a person. therefore it is anti-capitalist.
in continuing my practice of pre chinese imperial animist taoism, death practices, and dreamwork, i continually find obstruction, violence and dis-ease communicating with others via social media, because the outliers who are on either end of the attachment spectrum require an engagement that actually ruins wisdom based communication.
wisdom based communication is playful, dreamy, curious, specific, flexible and adaptive, all together
many people have a good attachment relationship to words and learning, able to engage without needing to “believe or disbelieve”. however many people do not, and words are a battlefield of control.
i like to use facebook as a kind of permanent-impermanent stage. the black box theater is where i learned to create without perfectionism, where iterations can exist ephemerally, be born and die and reborn in ways that enhance embodied wisdom of our inherent nature.
however not everyone is playing that game, so we return to the combat sports metaphor, the cult metaphor, the capitalist and fundamentalist religion style of behaviors.
i can see a desire in my soma to shift to a kind of “closed” platform based style of engaging with people, using a mighty networks or other invitation or subscription based platform of communication.
i also feel myself completely differentiating from all forms of social justice rhetoric, because i believe that many people are just saying the word justice over and over, but not really practicing it. the extreme backstage politics of the social justice industry, competing for contracts, narratives and attention… is just, well, if you know you know.
finally, in the pursuit of justice, there are two final frontiers for many people. one is simply race itself. the other is spirit possession and the true nature of humans as portals and as nature looking back at itself.
wisdom based discourse is fundamental to these inquiries.
i think its useful to say that not everyone hungers for wisdom, and many people hunger for power because power seems to equate to safety and pleasure. im not sure what factors collaborate to create the kind of human who wants to practice wisdom, given the levels of confusion, pain and opposition/threat that one might encounter doing so.
practicing any kind of “real” wisdom is akin to opening up oneself to being wrong, every moment, and living in a kind of perma-confusion liminal state, where one is constantly examining and playing with their experiences, thoughts, beliefs etc.
you either love the process or you hate it, it seems.
the best advice i can throw back in time to my former self is to seek stability first, and then through titrated games, destabilize that stability. seeking “wisdom” without first cultivating stability is a total chaotic mindfuck and provides really intense experiences… i dont necessarily regret the path, but it would be unethical of me to try to teach or replicate my path as it was very dangerous and often times stupid.
i kind of did things backwards, i died before i truly lived, i sought chaos before order, and transformation before stability.
i dont think that my fate would have really allowed anything else, as i can really appreciate life in all its ordinary nonsense now, because of how psychedelically chaotic my youth was.
but ultimately, everything rejoins the great ocean of blood in non linear being.
that right there, is the base. now, from that base, talk about justice.
[part 2]
in a capitalistic frame, it only makes sense/cents that to survive and gain power, one would leverage all aspects of themselves, their bodies and lineages, as products and symbols.
our skin tone, lineage, family, gender, sexuality etc… our identities become our brands and brands become our identities, thus #payingtherent, #buyingthefood, the pleasure, the safety.
in this constructed worldview, relationships become the markers of how you are able to leverage your identity, your body, for power.
as such, i can only really subtitle this writing as “pale skin person of color finds belonging in non-belonging”
because of my white mother and my white skin, i am not easily accepted into the “poc party”. i would argue that im not accepted at all into the #POCparty, but that might be a bit extreme. certainly, it takes a wise eye to recognize me beyond the obviousness of my pale skin.
because of my pale skin i do not share the physical threat of darker skinned people, and because i do not share that threat, i do not belong.
because i have white skin, but am not white, i also do not belong to whiteness, but no one can truly belong to whiteness, since whiteness prides itself on competition and thus, non-belonging, exile and abandonment as a baseline, thus requiring “power” to survive.
so i do not belong, for very different reasons, to either sides of the racial divide.
thus, through non-belonging i sought belonging, because all mammals seek belonging.
i found non-belonging-belonging in a liminal space, most exemplified via animism and taoism, creative arts and ritual altered states of consciousness.
as i am pulled inevitably towards my death, i pass through groups and bodies who have very different lived experiences of what it means to belong/not belong.
i can only speak from my lived experience of being a pale skinned not white person, in a society of binary codes and enforced communal violences.
if i were darker skinned, i imagine that my entire worldview and life path would have been very different, perhaps more certain and fixed, easily defined, easily identified.
therefore my identitybrand/brandidentity can only reflect the myriad other identities surrounding it, as a kind of strange mirror. people see of me what they can see of themselves, reflected back from their own projections and experiences.
i am learning to relax vigilantly/vigilantly relax in such a position.
this level of honesty is very weird. i do not subscribe to trust or distrust as a baseline, but more of trustlessness as a ground for paradoxical wisdom. it is sad sometimes and not sad sometimes, sometimes at the same time.
most people seek to join groups that reinforce the beliefs they already have about their identities. wisdom would tell us that this is not wise. better to join many groups reinforcing many kinds of beliefs, including completely contradictory beliefs. wisdom is interested in more options, more play, more change, in order to feel the natural beingness at the root of all things.
why bother trusting people who have extremely limited parameters around their identities, even if those parameters seem correct, moral, righteous, etc? this kind of trust would be naive and hypocritical at best, given the basic impermanence of things.