grief (and rage) are just the very first parts of death practice. it strikes me as telling that resistances towards acceptance of these states and moving through them to whats beyond are so prevalent. its like watching someone pick at scabs. this culture, these behavorial stories are so fucking boring and remedial, and yet so sticky, because we are constantly threatening each other and being threatened. we act like abused dogs because we are abused dogs, but we have the option of growing out of that kind of misery.
the amount of status jockeying, and trying to market addiction as pleasure is rampant. social media amplifies and replicates the parts of our cultural identity that cant be satisfied, the vampiric parts of the self that thinks it can last, thinks that its the best thing since sliced bread. news flash, there is no abiding self. our identities are queer polyrhythms that only hold a stable shape for a little while. all this seeking of erotic satisfaction, pleasure and power are exactly why we are such craven, miserable pricks to ourselves and each other.
dont worry though, i was once easily conned too. desperation makes an easy mark for hustlers wearing guru masks. this culture is a psyop, meaning, we get brainwashed and tortured into compliance. the trick is to find the other options that are not either compliance or resistance to compliance, but neither compliance nor resistance. it is akin to befriending the disease that will eventually kill your body because one, you realize the inevitable and two, that youd rather die laughing with than cursing creator.
all of us have been given some small amount of time to play this dream game. we get to be the face of the ancestral pattern, we get to nudge the air a little bit while we wear the suit. and then, we move on. how we move on is largely a matter of how we have trained our attention, our capacity to attend. not only what or who we attend to, but how expansive and high resolution we can allow our attention to saturate us. it may be that what we call soul or mind is actually a shard of this universal attention, dreaming and creating and experiencing itself through us, and thus the collective. in this way we can know that we steward and entrain this shard baby, so that when they return to the dao, it knows something of choosing kindness in the storm of adversity.