Dare Carrasquillo

Alternative Title: The Basic Scam of Our Cultural Stories

 

No one is a success.

And no one is a failure.

Humans aren’t really self-actualizable.¹

So if we can’t really sElfffff-AAACKTUALiiiizzzzee, what can we do? Weep, weep, cry, cry, hmmm????

What we can do is work with, directly engage with, the experiences we have, that we think and feel, without obeying those experiences as ultimate truths or personal lore.

If we can do this (and there are infinite reasons why we would lie about being able to do this, without actually doing it) then we can be here, really here, relate with other beings and things, and leave without holding onto anything.

But why would we do this when the vast majority of society and our own basic addictive, narcissistic tendencies tell us to do otherwise?

One thing to note here is just the time it takes to actually mature the brain and nervous system. To stop overstimulating yourself as a lifestyle norm.

Another thing is that the fundamental and incurable core of life is pain, fear and insatiable desire.

We cannot solve these things.

They are the price of admission and the ticket is already stamped and in our pockets.

But the grifters, grifters everywhere have a special hack for you only nine ninety nine ninety five. (this is a back to the future reference, kids)

“it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

This means that power is a narcotic dissociative and the exploitation required to hoard excess resources prevents one from being present, relationally sane.

The trick is to be able to honestly express, in simple plain language, when you feel bad. And to sit intently and intentionally with that without solving it.

To fully examine and perceive and feel the phenomenon with care and artistic distance. To be able to stop lying to yourself and others, to stop trying to game the system and get ahead.

The basic premise of this exercise, and of relational, somatic honesty is excruciatingly simple: everyone is afraid (and mad and sad and) about being exiled and dying alone, unloved, poor, starving, discarded by the future we were promised by liars and thieves.

This is it.

Every attachment wound, every addictive reaction, every manic episode, every depressive crash, has as a component this intense intensity.

 

Say it with me now:

 

From that basic worry we generate the ten thousand various ways to either try and prevent that from happening or to try and distract ourselves from the feelings around it.

There is no magic therapeutic technique that can cure you of this core pain. (Though entire religious and therapeutic industries will say otherwise.)

There is only the correct or incorrect relational approach of being with what is.

Third thing.

If this shit is so simple, why is it so hard to admit or practice? Why is it so hard to stop chasing and worshipping desires? Why is it so hard to stop trying to transform the present moment?

One, the basic nervous system is designed to predict (i.e. hallucinate/generate perception) in order to survive. This prediction system alone is enough to screw us up and create entire cultic societies.

Two, the human nervous system as we know it to be, after much evolution, works best in collectivist small herds/bands of inter-generational hunter-gatherers that live in accordance with nature. This can be summed up as indigenous land-based governance systems, which are context specific, yet have shared principles across bio-regional ecosystems.

Three, the modern person’s brain has been trained by a colonial/imperial/violent economic system in which every single choice/action is weighed against a colonial cost benefit risk assessment.

This means that even your personal and interpersonal and emotional choices/actions are first filtered through this colonial transactional value system, even before you try and switch to a more prosocial or humane or empathetic value system for assessing risk.

If you track, within even a single chunk of time, how often you reference this valuation system, and how often you make choices based on what you would rather prefer to be doing/having/feeling right now, you will begin to see the utter lunacy of survival loops which eviscerate the ideas of free will and consent.

I do not say this from some magic hill in which this refer-prefer pattern has been vanquished.

I say this as someone who has been to the end of the reference-preference dead end and have not found anything resembling contentment or peace there.

And yet every day i watch my system perform these actions as if there will be a new, better prize hidden under the same plastic cup.

 

So, the basic therapeutic practice is thus:

• Feel-sense your physical body. This means sinking the mind into the body. Notice where the most “intensity” is. Place your attention/awareness there with no intentions to transform or change it whatsoever. By doing so, the feelings may intensify.
• Place a hand on the place if it is useful.
• Say, out loud, a version of this phrase “I feel ___.” Do not go into any reasons or stories about why you think you feel this way. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
• Notice how it feels to just say the honest thing without doing anything else.
• Continue to slowly pour your awareness into the intensity without any scheme to change anything, noticing what happens.
• If surges of emotion, pain, fear, etc. arise, just repeat/continue the process, say the honest thing, settle back into aware-contact-without-transforming.
• After this has become the new habit, you can “play” with this technique and with your body-mind-feelings through poetic “call & response”, oral spontaneous nature-based poetry, active dreaming-while-awake, etc, but all of these “doings” will also attempt to pull you away from the basic practice because they feel more exciting aka dissociative. The key is to learn this pattern of self-deception and reverse it.
• Now, as a bonus, imagine if people in relationships could do this, WITHOUT SEEKING ANY KIND OF FIXING and without seeking any kind of intersectional/systemic perfect explanation for why we feel what we feel and why we react the way we react to feelings that feel bad. You would need to have a shared VIEW wouldn’t you, and enough experience in NOT chasing your preferences.

 

Not-s0-basic Practice, Level 2

I have used poetry, from many traditions, reading, writing and speaking, in order to help me do 3 things:

1. decolonize my use of the english language and transform into a more honest, animistic array of options. This has, in many ways, changed my actual brain. Changing my language changed my thinking. It feels like my mouth and brain are more directly wired together into my whole body.
2. use language to feel as if i can contact/play with nondual and immaterial parts/aspects of reality. (no need for grandiose magical thinking)
3. have an expressive outlet that is not about striving towards a future goal. poetry (and i use this inclusive term broadly and loosely) has a very immediate somatic cause-effect loop.

Now, this is still a practice, with specific techniques, built on the previous technique. There are many ways to do poetry, i am not claiming to prioritize them all equally.

There is a great tradition of nature and death poetry outside of the colonial framework. What I have learned from these poems is that silence and minimalism is valuable, and reporting plainly is also valuable. Sometimes it really is: first thought best thought. Sometimes.

What tends to matter is that you use both the interior perception of the body/mind and the exterior perception of the environment as an interconnected landscape in which you “merely” report what is there. Like an emotional journalist who has no audience to sell to. All you have is the integrity of the effort itself. Sometimes the interior and exterior are fused or inter-penetrated, sometimes it is more like an oscillation between them. There is no striving for a “sense of one-ness” or any other salvation bullshit. It is just about a kind of honesty.

The last technical point is that sometimes it is useful to compose the poems line by line, orally, with no second takes or writing/editing. This way, it is like a performance in which there are no “take-backs” or mistakes, and this helps you become very present.

 

So, an example i have done in the last few minutes:

Simple, plain, not trying to impress anyone. The point is to be stark, honest. To have a simple call & response pattern with reality as it is. The dream. It is also not about explaining. The difference between poetic writing and other kinds of writing is that the desire to be clearly understood is not the same. When i write these articles, i have to assume that there are people reading who have never done any kind of creative, expressive or decolonial work ever, and are entangled in a mess of wrong story, so i have to clearly and annoyingly explain what i mean.

When i write or more accurately, COMPOSE poetry, it is much closer to the theatrical process in which mood, vibe, emotional tone and expression are the point in and of themselves. Being understood is not even close to the goal.

I am in a devotional, playful, intimate and sublime communication game with reality.

The poetry as an artifact is less important than: can i stay WITH what is happening directly as it is happening?

I call this a Folkloric approach to nondual animism.

 

Here is a bit longer example:

 

 

 

1 the entire narrative around Maslow and his hierarchy of needs is like a hall of mirrors of colonization. you can read here and here for just a small taste of the bullshit.

 

*feature image is of a buddha statue i took at the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago. It’s taken through the glass case of another artifact, creating this trippy image i felt was more true than the truth.

 

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housekeeping

I am entering into a month of hospital visits and pretty stressful situations. As such, for the past several months and currently I have not been able to really figure out how i am going to make money. I am not able to, in any way, sense into a future. I can only deal with what’s happening in front of me, and my health has been a major spiritual weight for decades.

If you feel so inclined, if my work has been helpful, please share it, and consider donating to my hospital fund via paypal or venmo:

http://paypal.me/daresohei

https://venmo.com/u/Dare-Sohei

Thanks