Beyond For and Against

Beyond For and Against: A Journeyman Tale

He sat in the woods. A large owl or hawk flew low, weaving through the ponderosas. He smiled. They revealed the Nature of an attention beyond for and against; the Hunter’s world, the world of the Living.

In the distance, the highway hummed.Lava buttes careened in sharp, hard-edge chunks upon a sea of several inches of pine needles, in various stages of decay, readily giving way to soft, yellow, volcanic ash.

The place smelled of pines.

He’d been chewing on Silence for over a year. Silence told him it was now Her turn to chew him, until he could HEAR Her Language spoken in the Truth of bare-bones, no-bullshit Reality. Silence called him to pay attention, to digest, to move beyond preferences and see the Unfolding She revealed nakedly; Seeing, Hearing, and Moving. No additives, no interpretations.

“This is reality,” She said, in the Silent Voice of BEING, “Can you SEE it? Can you HEAR it? Can you MOVE in it? Can you resist the urge to always add or take away from it? Can you SEE, HEAR and MOVE in My Invitation without trying to continually adjust it to fit what you’d prefer?”

Silence invited him through that hole in his soul he pretended, for so long, wasn’t there, through the Hunger, there, touching the Raw Edges with Kindness, noticing all the ways he tried to avoid them. She invited him in and through, all the way to Her World; a World Woven in the Whirling Warp and Woof of Doing, and Undoing. Alone took him to CONNECTED, to SUPPORT, to GROUND.

He lived there, until he learned to live there well; nowhere to go, no one to look for. Relaxing in that support he recognized that the entire Universe was already being Offered. The only thing that shut him out from wealth and joy was his insistent seeking of it, in the persistent conviction that it was always elsewhere. He was invited to notice, and to Receive – not take – what had already been, and was continually being, Offered.

Six years of roaming the world, and teaching, had shown him the human world, up close and personally, in many variations. Some still lived magnificently, with the regal elegance and sumptuous simplicity of the free. He sat at their cooking fires, slept on sheepskins, in their homes, walked in their mountains. They welcomed him. Some warned him:

“Some are too far gone, amigo. They can’t be helped. It’s a cycle. Some will remain when this all rolls over. Help them. Pay attention and you’ll know where your seeds grow, and where they don’t. It is very simple; far simpler than your imaginings. Don’t try to plant a garden in the middle of the highway. See the Nature of things, instead of trying to make things what they’re not.”

Unexpected patterns in the modern, amnesic versions of “humanity” emerged. A lifetime of traveling, living among different people, living in different ecosystems, economies, cultures, and then returning at different phases of the cycle, often with years and decades in between, revealed the cycling. He felt grief, outrage, and his reactive refusal of reality repeatedly. He felt all of that, until his eyes could SEE what he liked, and what he disliked.

Eventually he saw the Naked Truth of Seeing, Hearing, and Moving. Eventually he could feel without always trying to rearrange the feeling. He began to SEE the Nature of things, an Art are only mastered without additions, without subtractions, daring to behold and to be in reality.

It took the better part of four years to begin to integrate the teaching experience deeply. Then several more to relax, to ease up and enjoy the Nature of what Simplicity revealed. He had been treated very kindly and generously around the world. The sadness he felt was for so many of those he met, how they lived at odds with themselves.

A fuller range of play in consciousness than reactive like and dislike, and selective and reactive “awareness” started to open up slowly. He noticed new textures, rhythms, connections, pulsations, growth and undoing. He could see the nuances of a world that is ALIVE in perpetual transformation – moving through forms, to new forms, moving.

He could SEE what he SAW nakedly. He could see through and beyond his horror at the degradation of his own species, his wishful thinking about all the ways he could “help,” all the way to Life’s Wisdom and Invitation; beyond moralizing, beyond what he wished were true, but wasn’t.

In degradation was the soil for the seeding and sprouting of a very vital creativity. Growing gardens and sowing permacultured forests helped him see the goodness and vitality of decay.

He began to SEE, JUST See, beyond impressions, beyond reactions, beyond the easy sense of opposition, all the way to a deeply curious disposition for the unfolding Wisdom and Beauty of a Living Planet that creates in Cycles of Undoing. He marveled at Life’s catastrophic-creative Power. Its tracks were everywhere. Every tender sprout emerging from the bones of decay.

He embraced its challenge to Excellence, to continual arising out of the shell of what he had already-been, what he had already concluded, like a tree emerges in a continual journey out of the shell of the seed, the bark, the shape.

Chipmunks came to visit and chatter with scandalous glee, running up and down tree trunks, coming near, running off, opening their round, tender eyes and making contact. In the early mornings sometimes he heard a hermit thrush singing, all alone. Birds would come visit and stay, losing all fear, coming near to get related, inviting his living into theirs.

Sometimes whole flocks would come, southbound toward the warmth. When the flute played him, instead of the other way around, birds would come near and dance in circles, on the wing, to that One Song, that both they, and the flute, were singing.

A deeper, richer sense of Aliveness, of the beating, pulsing, heating, cooling, living, dying, and always emergent Wisdom of Aliveness woke up in him. Her Shapes were his Shapes. He came alive. As extraordinary as it initially seemed to be playing a flute in the middle of a forest with birds flying around his song, he realized that it was absolutely ordinary, and it wasn’t his song. We are Shapes of the Song. Silence is the Singer.

“This is how Aliveness lives;

The Invitation that Aliveness IS,

the Dance of it, the Song of it.”

To be both human and alienated from that Living Reality, to be so absorbed in a deadening busyness that people could “live” without noticing the Invitation of Aliveness fully; without open and empty hands and a heart cleared of all encumbrances to simply receiving, to saying YES to Aliveness, to BEING – this, too, was extraordinary. All of these Shapes of Experience will nourish emerging Shapes of Experiencing.

This, too, was a phase, a shape, a consequence and part of a totality of infinite shapes, phases and nuances. As he recognized any particular phase, he beheld that phase’s transitions.

He felt privileged. He savored the days, the cold mornings, the warming sun, the Silence. In the mornings he’d make a small fire and burn cedar and juniper. He lived well. He luxuriated in rich simplicity, no need unmet, no delight unfulfilled, with companions of a thousand Shapes, Songs, Sizes, and Phases. Something Magnificent was Working in a dimension of Bigness that he could only begin to behold, and appreciate.

Work would come up every now and then. It took little to live much, and richly. Ten days of work fed a couple months of travel, of learning, unlearning, celebrating, nourishing, singing, feeding and Silence. He was up for most any odd job, and the learning that came with it. They’d present themselves as he met people.

He always learned something in working at different jobs, with different people. He no longer felt he had to “be” this, that or the other. Traveling could be done anywhere, even spending years in one very small place. Traveling enriched him, weaving new shapes and response-abilities in the Journey of Aliveness. He felt at home in the world.

To travel was to learn, to see the world richly, in the diversity and changes of its nuances and expressions. He saw that humanity was dying and that, insofar as that seemed to be a problem, that very problem was rapidly becoming its own solution. Humanity was dying into a new Seeding.

As he paid attention, taught, learned and unlearned, and spent months at a time in Silence and in Nature, he began to see things plainly, in their actual Nature, all the way to the Beauty, the Poetry, the Generosity and Necessity of death, of being fed and feeding, in turn. With decades out in nature, and decades working in critical care medicine, the Wisdom of the Unfolding Dying revealed itself.

Twenty-five years in nursing had taught him about protoplasm, the vital qualities of any organism.

After six years of traveling around the world and seeing up close and personally how profound peoples’ struggles were, he slowly allowed himself to just see it, with less and less drama, less labeling, greater attention, and more and more curiosity, and interest. The human protoplasm is turning into Food for other Shapes of Aliveness. This was not a problem.

Occasionally he’d meet certain people with exceptional gifts, clarity and capacities. They were not only a counterpoint to the degradation, their genius was a seeding at the heart of the compost pile of the degradation. Living out in natural places began to literally in-form him of the Wisdom that Life unfolds in, the creative destruction of it, the Shaping, the Feeding, the Birthing and the Undoing, the Complementary Counter-Currents that the Aliveness Creates Catastrophically with.

Whole new forests arose out of the bones of fallen trees. Living feeds the Living.

He saw that this creative-destructive dynamic in all phases of Aliveness. Aliveness births a Greater Aliveness from its bones.

Eventually, through deep observation, he went beyond making peace with it, seeing the Unfolding deeply and attentively. There was no “peace” to be made. Even “peace” was refusal. What there was, was Living. He danced the bones that he had, on loan, from the Rock Old Woman, upon the bones that the Rock Old Woman had already ground down, making ground, sprouting Life.

He had been around the world “trying to make a difference” in the lives of people in whose lives little real difference could be made. At the same time, the entirety of Living was making the necessary differences; always had, always will.

He began to see this relationship to the world of “making a difference,” the presumptions of “improvement,” and the tremendous dynamics of an evolutionary unfolding that these small human pretensions are absurd, tender and, quite often, heartbreaking, in.

He taught until teaching deeply challenged him to a learning and unlearning far more mysterious and whole than anything he had ever imagined or desired. His previous beliefs and model of the world were false. It was up to him, not the world, to adapt, to SEE it, to HEAR it, to MOVE in and with it.

The further he “advanced,” the further he discovered that he was earning a Ph.D. in becoming a Beginner, over and over again, returning to the primary and the obvious to SEE it for the FIRST time; not the last time, or the next time; THIS See-ing.

The degradation of humanity was a complex, profoundly connected, natural, cultural, imperial and ecosystemic event, a phase in a cycle. Not all peoples were at the same phase. Many modern people were. “Modern” was a very biologically diminished shape of human compensating for its vital degradation with techno-logic; a curious shape, a momentary shape, a shape that would feed more vital shapes.

Some Peoples were still full of Life and waiting for the cultural sickness that had overtaken so much of mankind, and tried to overtake them, to wipe itself out. He had met them, too. They were vital, vigorous and patient. They spoke of “a Remnant,” of “outlasting.” They told him to work for the Remnant and not waste his energy trying to help people insistently degrading themselves, or even judging them. The forces in motion were greater than the smallness of his preferences.

Hard times were already upon the “moderns,” devastating families, relationships, societies. They barely noticed the deeper dimensions of what was happening to them; their intelligence, their sense-ability too far gone, their vision of “being human” totally decontextualized, like slaves with history. “People” whited out, blacked out, redded out, yellowed out; generic humans.

They thought it was normal to need anti-depressants, to suffer arthritis, or brain fog, to be overweight, to have allergies, to have rotting teeth, live a life of continual busyness, relationships that sucked, relatives you can’t stand being around, continual financial struggles and be ruled by psychopaths lying openly to them while they defended those who robbed them.

He took it all in, coolly. Sometimes it didn’t seem real.

It was real… but only as a small phase, and as a small range of perception in a Greater Unfolding. The human experience was one minute, yet immense, shape of experience available in an immense gorgeous field of shapes of experiences. He beheld the human experiences and invited himself to behold the gorgeousness of the Greater Aliveness that it was a transitional expression in. He marveled.

Real, effective and simple remedies for most people’s problems were right at hand. Few would do anything with them, even when they asked for and were offered them. They’d take, but they wouldn’t receive, having long forgotten the difference. He saw it so many times in so many different places that he finally realized that this was a structural, a neurological, a biological condition of people already too far gone to act in their own favor.

People had paid pay him handsomely to learn, then did nothing with what was offered. At first this pissed him off. As he saw the same phenomenon repeatedly across the world he began to get the reality he was in, and the illusions he had premised his enthusiastic teaching upon. “Protoplasm,” the Aliveness whispered to him, “come into my forests, my coasts, my mountains and pay attention to protoplasm, the vital qualities of being-Alive.”

Most people who came to workshops wanted to experience something different, to be entertained, to meet some other people, to be relieved of their daily routine, to experience connection, some invitation to intelligence, to learning, even if only for a few hours, a few days, a few months. They would do little to nothing in their own favor beyond that. He watched in horrified amazement and concern, until the repetition of the pattern revealed what a number of elders had already told him: “Some are too far gone. Sow your seeds where they will grow.”

If they were ill, that illness often served more than one function. He began to see that “problems” are not just problems, they are also solutions. Not everyone wanted to live.

“Should they?” he asked himself, “DO they?” Few DID. “What was wrong with that?” “What if nothing is wrong in the universe, only the perfect consequence of the sequence of preceding and proceeding catastrophic-creative unfolding?”

In six years teaching and working with hundreds of clients he met three individuals with the qualities of passion and application and care that qualify a student, with that impassioned, attentive, caring engagement with Living. At first, he couldn’t believe how few people were in any kind of shape to learn anything at a deep level. They could learn skills. They could become “useful” in that human resource kind of way that the culture revolves around.

Eventually, rather than being alarmed that so few were “in any shape to learn deeply,” he challenged himself deeply to notice what kind of shape they were actually in, to learn even more deeply himself. All shapes are both consequence and consequent. He attended to his and those that were brimful with Aliveness.

The three individuals with the quality of students amazed him. They were like super-concentrated counterpoints to the general trend. He marveled at the potential inside of one single person passionately engaged with caring for and applying themselves. To awaken and to embrace BEING HUMAN was astounding, inspiring, superb. Three was plenty. He’d think of them, years later, and experience the thrill of such people who loved living in receiving the invitation to Brilliance they, and the world, are woven of.

Most were not quite living, not quite dead… they were in the haze that a human organism enters when almost the entirety of the logic of his Aliveness has been systematically set at odds against itself. This kind of institutionalized frustration turns an organism into a mechanism, a machine. They could repeat almost anything they heard, verbatim, like tape recorders. They would do almost nothing with what they could repeat, even years later but they “liked” what they had heard and would repeat, verbatim. This baffled him. He took offense, alarm, protested, wondered what he could do, trying all kinds of things.

Every time he challenged them to do or learn something beyond that they smiled with blank, vacant stares. It was odd to see those blank stares repeatedly, cross-culturally. White people were the worst off, but the rest weren’t far behind.

He recalled his teacher, decades before, telling him

“I don’t live in the same world as you. We are so different that we are almost like different species. You are a human. I am a human being. You think like a human. I think like an animal.”

Now he knew the sense of those words in a living world, and the challenge of relating to reality non-sense-ically, the possibility of relating sense-ably.

Human resources weren’t happy, but they were “fine.” The trick we were taught was how to be “fine,” no matter what, immune to our own sense-ability, mechanically “unique,” like a pickup truck that’s been owned for ten years and has its “very own, unique” brand of stickers spouting slogans. We develop “personality.” Each person thinks we’re “unique.” We beg to be equal, and become equal, like a field of Monsanto soybeans.

We ignore that person comes from the Latin persona: “mask,” a mask so finely wrought that it not only fools others, we are even masked to ourselves. 

As he discovered the connection between the sense of the words he used everyday, and what they reveal of his everyday living, and “worldviews” almost entirely divorced from sense, he began to view the world, as well as his “worldviews,” with greater curiosity. He began to look beyond the sound-bite, the catch-phrase.

With time and experience, as he taught and observed in more countries and studied the deep cultural, economic, educational, familial and relational dynamics at play, he saw that the imperial system had achieved exactly what it’s proponents and apologists had outlined, by the very methods outlined. The fashioners of culture played an open hand. They published books clearly explaining their methods, knowing full well that the people had no toolkit or skill set to engage coherently with such information. Public schooling guaranteed that they would never take up the task of putting such a toolkit together; decades of being led by the nose created neurologies designed to be led by the nose.

He recognized a masterpiece, a job thoroughly done upon a “public” trained to be immune to, and complicit in, its own debasement. He let go of the outrage and simplistic “anti-imperialism.” Curiosity deepened. His travels revealed clearly the genius of this globalizing and mechanizing, technologizing empire of slaves:

It was spread at the slaves’ insistence. ALL of them. The corporate drones, the dreadlocked “anti-establishmentarians,” the “become the change you want to see” crowd, and the “lightworkers.” They all spoke in a pre-baked patois of regurgitated recipes that spared them any need to observe with their senses, to think from observation on their own. He recognized a psychopathic masterpiece. In recognizing it in others, began to recognize these same dynamics at play in his own way of being-in-refusal. He beheld the Minotaur in the labyrinth of his own neurology.

Life, for so many, became a hypnotic trance devoid of any call to greatness, especially from oneself. What mattered was to “feel good” and ignore anything that didn’t inspire that feeling. “Feeling good” was rarely all that great, but there were all kinds of things for sale to distract from any need for living in Life’s greatness.

Everyone could go out and “protest,” effectively begging others to do for them what they refused to do for themselves. And they did. Almost all participated in “somebody-owes-me-something-ism.” Some thought they were lefties, others thought they were conservatives, almost all of them thought somebody owed them something, like children and slaves, refusing to emancipate themselves.

So did he. Then he SAW it, astounded to see it in himself, catching himself in the logic of empire’s imperatives, imposed at his own insistence as much as that of anyone else. He began to see how empire’s game is to teach each one of us to fool ourselves:

He thought his “students” owed him the courage to actually take the steps toward health, intelligence, relational healing, economic liberation that they had begged him insistently to teach them and paid him handsomely for, paid pittances for, or received for free. Then he looked up the etymology to discover the sense-able reality of what a student is, from the Latin studium: “application and care.” He laughed. He beheld. He SAW.

In six years he’d met three students, three people whose love for being alive took them to actually challenging themselves and venturing beyond the edges of the pre-baked.

He visited with people and observed. Little that was obvious could be talked about without “being impolite.” He learned to keep his mouth as close to shut as he could and his eyes and ears open. To be “polite” was to ignore the obvious; the “deadness” of the lives of a people without any real people, without any real intimacy, without truth, especially the truth of that which was obvious, and in whose presence he became more and more of a nuisance. He sucked at lying.

He lived in the woods, chewing on the Silence, watching the owls and the hawks, listening to chipmunks and breathing deeply of pines. The Silence spoke to him through the BEING of things. Not words, but realities, revealing to him very simply how things are; what he had already seen repeatedly, and what he had hoped could be different yet remained exactly as he wished it weren’t. He opened his eyes wider, slowed down, paid deeper attention, touched his sadness and longing for truly alive company, and found it in the midst of the Truly Living.

Nature was the teacher. He soaked his consciousness deeply, sense-ably in the Intelligence that’s Alive by BEING there, inside of it. Noticing in a very relaxed and sustained way the rhythms, the cycles, the qualities of movement, the sounds, the patterns. He became that. When he went into the city he recognized the same thing.

He could See, Hear and Move! He could see people plainly, as Living Structures, without any need to engage in “everybody’s beautiful” fantasies or “everybody’s fucked” catastrophisms. Tracks revealed Unfolding. The Nature of everything was revealed by its Nature, simply. It all formed part of an infinite Circle, a Cycle, an Ecology, a Transformative, Emergent Intelligence; ALL of it. There was nothing to “fix” or improve.

Invitations could be made wisely, recognizing the Nature of those to whom they were made. He began to cherish his Life Energy like a seed, cherished Silence, relished Solitude and the company of Shapes of Being that still danced, swayed, flowered and played in the Grand Adventure and Invitation of Aliveness. He became natural.

He could look at a face, a way of walking and SEE what that kind of structure expressed; the etymology of a Living BE-ing, what BE-ing speaks in being. He beheld the world in its magnificence, its literal “great making.” Aliveness was a Living Fabric woven of one cloth. Everything had a part in it.

He beheld and lived in cycles bodily; cycles of sunrise in the cold of morning, cycles of deep sleep accompanied by night bird songs, cycles of stars and fog, moon cycles, seasonal cycles, cycles of living in a place for weeks or months, seeing tribes of birds passing through and how they moved, cycles of profound Silence and Solitude, the cycles of all kinds of visitors, cycles of storms, barefoot walks in snow as Summer turned to Autumn and then the sharp tooth of Winter. He could FEEL. He discovered capacities in his body, like walking barefoot on snow, that weren’t born of any sort of machismo or hardship. They unfolded in contact, in curiosity, with respect and kindness toward self and the world.

He moved in the Sacred Land slowly, finding refuge in all kinds of different places he spent weeks and even months in, through the seasons and transitions, through the migrations of birds and weather. He beheld the Unfolding of the World in its Dynamic Splendor; Unfolding, Opening, Flowering, Decaying, Closing, Seeding. He beheld the Beauty of Aliveness.

The Destiny of a people insistently choosing ignorance, care-less-ness, stumbling like freak degenerates through Panther’s world, was just one part of a Fabric of Cyclical Unfolding. We are more than human; we are shapes of Earth. The Forest birthed Songs in him, Forest Songs. Just as he carried the delight of having sung and danced with birds doing aerial acrobatics in the Joy of Song, he knew those birds would also carry those songs and that delight southward to lands of People he loved in South America and sing to people and places he loved. They, too, followed the Journey.

He beheld humanity as he had during his years of nursing and accompanying people through that transition we call “death.” Nothing to say, except that which one says. Nothing to do, except that which one does, without striving against any outcome. Twenty years of critical care had shown him the profound kindness of death, as compared to all kinds of horrible and technologically-prolonged conditions.

Humanity was trying to stave off its biological undoing technologically. Every Shape of Aliveness was paying the price. This was just so. However it WAS was there to be SEEN, HEARD, FELT, and MOVED IN, Sense-Ably.

He went out to the woods to sing and to Celebrate Being Alive with that which still lived in the Celebration of Aliveness. He celebrated reality. The reality of death which fed fallen trees to his fire. The reality of life which brought the Beauty of Aliveness to his Living, fed by the ashes of fallen trees.

The illusion of “change” was self-aggrandizing folly. Everything was changing, cycling. Everything-that-is feeds everything- that-is-becoming. Being is Becoming.

Reality was deeper and beyond for and against. The world was not at odds with itself, with his desires or even his frustrations. He allowed What-Is to BE and Celebrated Being by Being, simply, sense-ably, connectively.

Some people whose lives he had touched were unfolding into a greater aliveness on their own, taking their own journeys beyond the pointings of what he’d shared, into the textures, rhythms and flavors of their own lived experience , leading themselves in discovery. Sometimes just enough sustained contact allowed a seed to be sown.

In the meanwhile, he lived as his own best student, living richly, in Nature, nourishing his energy and health, paying attention to the Aliveness which filled him and surrounded him and steeping himself in the depths of its Life Logic.

He gathered seeds, of Life’s Wisdom, enjoying the Song of the World and the Silence afforded by allowing the human madness to continue without interference, rushing inexorably toward undoing, rushing inexorably toward regeneration in a Greater Aliveness. A world without remedy, unfolding in the cataclysmic unfolding of catastrophic creation.