I’m laying all this out for very specific reasons. In the constructed world of colonial values, personal preference is god – this means that whenever your total organism of processes and phenomena hits a certain level of intensity, it crosses a threshold limit, and at that moment the system in its craving to “protect itself” will enact whatever safety-stabilization protocol it deems necessary – which is to say it will default to its familiar “special exceptions”.

These exceptions are whatever the system believes will make its self-phantom “exceptional” – somehow able to excise itself from nature and be exempt from natural law.

The preferences, beliefs, desires and various other phenomena engage in the behavioral sequences ingrained in the organism’s conception-of-selfhood.

This conception-of-selfhood reifies and reinforces the Wrong Stories, Addictive States, and Abuse Actions that are co-factored and co-engrained within the organism’s autonomous nervous system – its fight-flight mechanics.

This produces a recursive loop which creates meanings which enforce pre-determined conclusions about reality.

It produces the very feelings and experiences which then spur the organism to solve or cure the symptoms, which are the feelings and experiences… it creates the problem which seeks the cure which creates the problem which seeks the cure…

This is the duality of the self. It appears “normal” because entire societies are mirroring this situation to each other as normal. All cognitively and emotionally drinking from the same poisoned well, producing outcomes which poison the well.

All of this is a product of many factors, but one major factor is that we have stripped Indigenous (matrifocal) governance from the land, and created the ideas of private land ownership, meaning that human dignity is severed at the root. Colonialism as a neuro-somatic-emotional domination and abuse system teaches people to hate and fear their bodies, so as to make them exploit their own bodies, the bodies of others, and especially the Land.

When you can see this clearly, without excessive backlog eruption, then you can begin to repair Dignity as a phenomenon of Nature-Reality, instead of as a wounded, pathetic, traumatized creature that is somehow separated from nature. I’ll say it again, “you” are not a “Self”, your system is a phenomenological process of Nature which also produces the appearance of selfhood.

“You” can never actually be harmed, and death is not some kind of final judgment, but merely a riverine transformation from one elemental form to another. The “self” ends, because the “self” was never a real “thing”. Your addiction to a permanent self is one of the main obstacles to your feelings of belonging, dignity, grace, mercy, responsibility, etc. Your desires to be remembered, to achieve great success, to quantify and qualify your situations as based on your “hard work” or merit, are all amplified delusions based on the severing of natural law and indigenous systems of Land stewardship, governance and relationship.

I state emphatically: animism and insert-your-favorite-ism-here are not the escapist salvation fantasies that your heart desires. It is very difficult to be free, not because it is hard to obtain, but because it is hard to remember. It is hard to maintain integrity and dignity within the storm of red dust that is our corporeal, relative, perception and interpretation-based existence. We have in many ways, outpaced ourselves.

Technologically, sure, yes, but also emotionally, informationally, and narratively.

We have narratively outpaced our capacities within social systems, and for sure within our own individual, biological system.

And because of this, we have become addicted to the chase, the pursuit of THE FUTURE ™.

It is, and always has been, our Achille’s heel.

We tend to believe a fairy tale of modernity, that somehow, our collective problems had a definitive starting date. Some say it was agriculture; some say Patriarchy, some say “original sin”… the silver bullets are plentiful, each person polishing their favorite one.

I will attempt to dissuade you from this siren’s call into the abyss.

As long as primates have existed, needing each other to survive, there has always been the co-emergent need to regularly “sit in ceremony”. This term I’m using, to sit in ceremony, is a placeholder for every single permutation and iteration of the idea that sitting in ceremony might entail.

Sitting in Ceremony is a dis-infectant. To sit in ceremony is an attempt to disinfect a wound, a wound that is inherent and baked-into the human condition.

There was never a place and time, an event, an idea, that “started” or created the wound. There has only ever been the situation at hand, which includes this wound. And since this wound exists, born into every human heart, then sitting in ceremony was also born along with it, a response to the call of the wound. For unattended, the wound will become infected. Nothing “makes” the wound infected, there is no malignant spirit sprinkling poison into the wound, there is just the everyday reality that the wound, unattended, will become infected, and this infection will spread until it has consumed the wound-bearer, and every other wound-bearer around that one.

Now from this explanation, look at our modern world. Who is able to sit in ceremony regularly, in a way that actually dis-infects the wound?

In the past, and in some still indigenous and tribal clans, the dis-infecting is done to the best of their ability by the community, through various collective rituals, festivals, rites of passage, etc.

Even with the best of intentions, the most intact philosophies and technologies, sometimes, the wound will not be dis-infected. Even before patriarchy, agriculture, colonialism.

Even when the odds were most in favor for dis-infecting, sometimes it would fail.

And now, when the odds are most certainly in favor of becoming infected? The chances of running the wound clean are even less, ridiculously, absurdly less.

I say this to get you to orient to reality, away from your precious fantasies.

If no one around you is able to really sit in ceremony, authentically and regularly – and even if they were the odds are not guaranteed that your wound becomes temporarily cleaned – then what is your real option?

I cannot answer for you, but I will tell you my process of inquiry.

It is to return to myself those narratives and processes which were lost, taken, forgotten, and then, to make something of those clues, to make something that attempts to do the fucking job. A tiny measure of sanity in a stupid world. A scrap-cloth doll beneath the old red sky.

And it is just a meager thing, a measly toy, already half broken upon first use.

But the thing itself is not the point. The thing itself is already an artifact.

It is the making, it is IN the making, that the ceremony is hidden in plain sight. Emerging and fading in the handling of it. Like how in utter defeat, the very hopelessness we feel contains within it the brightest light of the real, even if we cannot grasp it, even if we feel it runs away from us with sinister intent.

The trick is always simpler, the con is always given away for those with eyes to see, right at the moment of persuasion. The ball was never in the cup; the ceremony was never in the artifact.

And yet, we cry and beg for the appearance of the thing we say we want and ignore the thing we want when it shows up appearing other than what we have wished for.

Who am I to say this? How dare I? Exactly. How dare i… No one else can do any of this shit for you. Maybe sometimes we feel like they can, maybe in some places we feel like there are special people with special powers and special knowledge that can give us what we want, what we need. I am not talking about that; I don’t even care about that. I can’t count on it; it just wastes my time and attention.

The fairness of reality is that reality isn’t fair.

The work each of us must do is not something we would ever choose.

And while we run ’round in circles debating about this terrible unfairness, the wound is still there, becoming infected.

That’s all there is to it, there’s really nothing more than that. We can dress that up in lots of awesome costume, and every poet in every poem is saying something about it. Every singer in every song. There’s no end to it! You will hate what some people say about it, and fucking adore what some others say about it, hardly ever recognizing they are talking about the same thing.

The. Same. Thing.

But you have to have it a certain way.

This is the wound, too.

And that’s what we’ve got. The wound and the ceremonies and/or the lack thereof. And everything we do to try and get around it. The world of red dust.

This may seem bleak to you or fly in the face of the secularized, mutated christian values you ascribe to and believe. That’s part of why I write. The comparative evaluation script (some people are more valuable, and some people are less valuable) of colonial values is eating us all. I use my platform to describe an altogether different perceptual reality that is ungovernable. I get very tired of the idea that Daoism ™ is some kind of neutral, unbiased philosophy. It’s actually a lot like AI and Large Language Models –they are rife with premises and bias. Everyone has their own version… and I don’t think that’s a problem per se, what is a problem is when people are dishonest about it. When they use a philosophy to uphold colonial values, nation state-ism or other pet preferences and say that they are being neutral or following natural law or something. I’m saying right out loud, I use history, neuroscience, Daoism and nondual animism to explain Decolonial values and ideas.