part0015

“The process is simple and natural, but don’t let ego or vanity push you away. When you sense resistance, turn into it. When you sense bullshit, attack it. When you feel fear, go into it. When you stumble into darkness, light it up. When you write, puke all your messy, stupid, crazy thoughts and beliefs out onto the page. Make a promise to yourself that you’ll burn or delete everything you write so you can express yourself honestly without fear of judgment or ridicule. Once you start, it can come gushing out. Don’t hold back. Don’t edit yourself for public consumption; this isn’t a journal to share with your shrink or a diary your mom might see. It might seem brilliant and insightful when you’re writing it but foolish when you look back at it; you know you’re moving forward when you’re embarrassed by who you were yesterday. It might feel like creating or preserving, but it’s all about destroying the unreal, and everything in the dreamstate is unreal, including you. Focused thought is like a laser, so whatever you aim it at will be reduced to ash. Even if you start out trying to defend a belief, you always end up destroying it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the best way to get rid of built-up layers of childish belief and emotional debris is to expose it. This is the process of opening your eyes and learning to see. ‘You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life,’ wrote Whitman. ‘Why do my eyes hurt?’ asks Neo. ‘Because you’ve never used them before,’ answers Morpheus. ‘All thought is immoral,’ wrote Oscar Wilde. ‘It’s very essence is destruction. If you think of something, you destroy it. Nothing survives being thought of.’ Honest thought leads toward the destruction of the false self and realization of no-self. How could it be otherwise? Do you really think you can haul a lifetime’s accumulation of egoic garbage and emotional baggage into any sort of higher spiritual state? This is the real eye of the needle and you can’t bring anything with you; everything has to go and this is how it’s done. The only way to rid yourself of hardened emotional build-up is through a total purge, and the only way to do that is by reversing the master-slave relationship between heart and mind. You become what you are by un becoming what you’re not, and the only way I know to do that is the writing process. I’m not married to spiritual autolysis; if you could take a pill or chant a syllable or perform a ceremony and achieve the same result, I’d be talking about that. If meditation worked, I’d be its biggest fan. If someone wakes up by eating ice cream for a year I’ll let you know, but until then, you’ll have to use your brain.

“Once the process has really started, it takes on a life of its own. It’s like going on a physical purification routine and having cleanse reactions; you loosen up all this old stagnated crap in your system and you get sick as these stratified layers of unprocessed waste reenter your bloodstream and reinfect you, but then you purge it out, rest and recover, and start processing the next layer. Go for solo walks to let your thoughts and feelings run free, then return to the writing as you feel the urge. Isolate yourself as much as possible. Get away from the things of man. Live by night to have the world to yourself. Dump pleasures and minimize needs. Don’t look ahead, just worry about the next step. You’ll know when to walk and ponder, and you’ll know when you’re ready to pick up the pen and start again. You don’t need a list of rules to follow; it’s all inside waiting to come out and something much smarter than you or me will support and govern the process. As with a bad case of food poisoning, there’s a higher intelligence at work and you’re just along for the ride.

“The enemy lurks in shadow. Learn to watch for baseless belief and wishful thinking. Use words precisely, define meanings. Dispense with mystical and foreign terminology; if you can’t say it in your mother tongue, it doesn’t need saying. Make a study of biases and fallacies so you can see them and eliminate them. Remember that it’s not lies you’re destroying, it’s yourself, and the gentler you are, the more prolonged the process will be. The burning away of untruth leads invariably to no-self. That’s where self-inquiry leads, that’s where the journey to and through the inner black hole takes you, but knowing where you’re going doesn’t help just like knowing you have food poisoning doesn’t help. You have to go through the purgative process and get the offending toxins out of your system, that’s how you go back to the beginning and make a fresh start in the right direction. Compare this focused, high-intensity process to what normally passes for thought and you’ll see the real power of your mind when isolated from emotion and ego. By externalizing the process and learning to think lucidly and objectively, you’ll see what I mean when I say intelligence is nothing and thinking is everything.”

“The highest good resembles water,” I say, quoting the Tao Te Ching , I think .

“Yeah, how it seeks the path of least resistance, how it can take many forms and overcome obstacles, how the softest thing overcomes the hardest.”

I’d like to keep us from descending into tattoo parlor philosophy without being, as has been suggested on occasion, a total jag-off about it. Taoist teachings make for weak philosophy because Taoism is a state of being disguised as an ideology. You can study Taoist thought for the rest of your life and never learn the first thing about Taoism, or you can transition into adulthood and become a Taoist sage instantly because they’re just different ways of describing the same state. In theory, Taoism is about adulthood and nothing else. In practice, it’s a misguided attempt to convey adulthood to children instead of conveying children to adulthood. If Taoists understood Taoism, they would have been producing a constant stream of adults for the last few millennia, but they haven’t so they don’t. Like Zen and Advaita, Taoism is all show and no go. It’s just another spiritual goosechase resulting in little more than the ego-safe disposal of time and lifeforce.

“Water represents energy,” I tell Big Greg and those nearby, “so the comparison between yourself and water can open up your understanding of how your life really works, even in the juvenile state. The water thing is pretty simple. I describe it as pattern, flow and obstruction, and so on. Has your study of Taoism made any significant difference in your life; how you operate, how you understand the world? ”

“I don’t know, maybe a little,” he says.

“I’ll take that as a no,” I say. “The change we’re looking for is about as subtle as an earthquake, but that’s not what we see because Taoism teaches children how to act like adults, not how to become adults. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is not a game of dress-up or make-believe, it’s an actual death-rebirth process. As with all solutions offered by the spiritual marketplace, Taoism promises the rebirth part without the death part that must come first. That’s what keeps the spiritual marketplace in business. They promise you that you can get there from here, but you can’t. You have to go all the way back and start over.”

“Oh,” says Big Greg, looking glum. “I just thought it sounded pretty cool.”

“You’re right, it is pretty cool. If I sat here and told you all the ways my experience of being is different from yours, it would sound so cool you wouldn’t believe it; how I live effortlessly and flow through life, how my needs are met and my desires are made manifest, how my internal thoughts and my external environment are interwoven, but what good does my experience do you? You don’t need a picture of some better place to hang on your prison wall, you need a map to get you there, and you don’t need to worship the map, you need to follow it.”

“Oh,” he repeats.

“Yeah, okay,” he goes on to say .

“The water metaphor is accurate,” I continue, “but the point is to become, not act. It’s about transition, not growth. It’s an actual journey, but you can’t make it in a classroom. You’re sitting in a dungeon reading a book about life outside the dungeon – Taoism, Nonduality, Zen, the Bible, my books, whatever – but all they really do is pass the time. Your goal should not be to pass time but to seize it; to use your time and lifeforce to create and expand and discover, not living vicariously through tour guides. You do that by standing up and breaking out of the dungeon, by becoming the hero of your own story and setting out on your own adventure. Then you can throw the books away and write your own. Taoism is fine as far as it goes, but it really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not enough to study concepts and try to apply them in your life, you have to make the actual journey, or else you’re just relinquishing control and submitting to captivity. That’s the wrong kind of surrender you want. The spiritual marketplace promotes surrender in its negative aspect of complacency and inaction, but in its positive aspect, surrender is experienced as yielding and allowing and unifying. You don’t make that polar shift through gentle growth but through a cataclysmic transition.”

“Sure,” says Big Greg, “totally.”

“I myself live in alignment with the Tao, but I think of it as pattern. I flow along energetic lines like water; not that I’m in the flow but that I have merged with it. I don’t make hard turns but micro-adjustments so subtle that I’m barely aware of them. I find the path of least resistance naturally, not by controlling but by allowing. I manifest my authentic desires effortlessly because my desires and my dreamstate reality are in harmonious alignment. I have removed my blindfold, dismantled the structure of selfhood, and relaxed into the oceanic currents of being; not my being, but being as it manifests around me and through me and as me. Correctly understood, this is what Taoism is all about, but it’s not a teaching or a practice or a concept, it’s a journey of becoming which must begin with a process of un becoming. That’s the critical step that ego insists we ignore because it entails the dissolution of selfhood itself, and ego will do anything to survive.”

“Wow,” says Big Greg. “Yeah, okay.”

“You’re attracted to the spiritual marketplace version of Taoism. That’s the negative aspect, but it’s the positive aspect you really want. Through no fault of your own, you have committed a serious navigational error and you can never make progress until you go back and correct it. The spiritual marketplace is all about continuing as if no error occurred, and that’s why the success rate of awakening – both in and from the dreamstate – is so abysmal. Taoism is just another con game in the spiritual carnival. It has enough bells and whistles to lure you in, and then it dangles some bogus prize for you to play for until your time and lifeforce run out. The spiritual marketplace is not the total failure it appears to be; it’s extremely successful in its true objective of holding us prisoner in an unlocked cage and keeping us docile and sedate. By its fruits shall ye know it, and the fruit of the spiritual marketplace is the plodding, cud-munching herd. Think of Joe versus the Volcano ; Joe Banks sitting in his dungeon-like workplace. No one was making Joe shuffle to his soul-crushing job every day. No one locked him in. He wasn’t shackled to his desk. He was free to leave whenever he could muster the resolve, just like you are right now.”

“Right,” says Big Greg. “Yes.”

“Yes,” he confirms.

“I’m not picking on you or Taoism,” I tell him. “I applaud your discrimination. Zen, Taoism and Advaita are like our children who aren’t living up to their potential. They lie to us and steal from us, but we love them anyway because, frankly, they’re all we have. Whatever potential they once had has been co-opted and corrupted by ego. Ego doesn’t win by force and overcoming, but by the subtle manipulation of fear. Ego wins by avoiding conflict and maintaining the status quo.”

“Man,” says Big Greg, “okay.”

“Sure, totally,” he adds upon further reflection.

“The three jewels of Taoism are compassion, moderation and humility, but those aren’t pillars of freedom, they’re the bars of a cage. Fuck compassion, moderation and humility, and fuck anyone who promotes that bullshit. The watercourse way isn’t all about floating down a lazy river. Sometimes it’s about battering rapids and pounding waterfalls that tear you to shreds. That’s the death that must come before rebirth and there’s nothing compassionate, humble or moderate about it.”

Big Greg stares at me as if shaken from slumber. I knew from when we met earlier that this guy was a true warrior in a time of false peace. Behind the spiritual fatigue is a man who’s had enough of being told to sit quietly and act mellow. He’s been repressing his natural instinct to stand up and fight because he’s been constantly bombarded with this message of compassion, moderation and humility. He didn’t start with Taoism; he’s been looking for a cause to follow for a long time, but they’ve all fallen short. He’s mistaken teachings for action and understanding for progress, but he knows a call to action when he hears it. Now, perhaps, he sees that the urge he’s been suppressing is the very thing he needs to unleash.

“How hath this weakness taken thee?” I ask him quietly. “Whence springs this inglorious trouble, shameful to the brave? Forbid thyself to feebleness. Be thyself. Wake. Arise. Thus is the soul declared.”

A few nearby people have become a little agitated by my insurrectionist views and are expressing support for their cherished -isms, but that’s just ego reinforcing its shields. If I push back directly, my energy will be rerouted into those shields and strengthen their emotional resistance. My hope is that if I let people talk enough, eventually they’ll hear themselves. I listen to them for a few minutes before deciding I prefer listening to myself.

“Birds naturally fly, fish naturally swim, and humans naturally follow energetic pattern and flow. In a world of adults, there would be no such thing as Taoism because it’s really just our own natural development. Everyone would be a novice Taoist sage by their mid-teens. We don’t have to teach toddlers the mechanics of standing, walking and running, we just nurture and encourage them and they figure it out on their own. It’s the same with the mechanics of adulthood. Being Taoist sages is our stolen birthright; we just have to steal it back. ”

“So you’re a Taoist sage?” asks Big Greg’s equally bald, bespectacled and bearded but bigger son, Little Greg.

“I’m not a dues-paying member, but technically, yes, any Human Adult is automatically a Taoist master. Compare Taoism to Balancism. Am I a balance master? Sure, we all are. I’m sure we could all improve a bit, but we’ve all basically mastered the whole standing and walking thing, right? There’s an early lifestage when you’re down there on the floor and walking seems magical and mysterious, but you sort it out in the normal course of things and it becomes your natural way of getting around. Once you learn to walk, it doesn’t mean your journey is over, it means you’re ready to go somewhere. If everyone had their feet strapped together when they were born, then it would be normal for everyone to crawl everywhere and anyone who could stand up and walk would look almost god-like when all they really did was cut their strap and resume their natural development. That’s what’s going on with us, we were tampered with before we could defend ourselves. We were assimilated into the collective as children. Broken people broke us. Our feet were strapped and we never developed into our natural upright potential. You don’t overcome this handicap through compassion, moderation and humility, you do it by cutting the strap and learning to stand and walk on your own. We’re not deformed or aberrant or defective, we’ve just normalized an abnormal condition. If you understood your current condition compared to your natural potential, you wouldn’t be compassionate and humble and moderate, you’d be screaming and thrashing in a psychotic rage trying to cut your straps and free yourself from this state of bondage. No price would be too high; you’d cut the strap or cut through your legs without hesitation. The risk of death wouldn’t even factor into your thinking. Once you saw that you should be up on your feet, you’d never settle for crawling in the dirt again. So who wants to get this fire started?”