Our Poison is Our Medicine

Our Poison is Our Medicine

One day my teacher said, “Our poison is our medicine. In Takelma the word for ‘poison’ is the same word as for ‘medicine.’”

Many indigenous languages use the same word for poison as for medicine. So a “medicine person” is also a “poison person.” Much of what masquerades as “spirituality” is a categorical avoidance of our poison, often painfully carried by the next generation; our children.

Alice Miller has written at length at how this dynamic plays out, not only on the individual level, but at national and global levels, as well. The child becomes a poison container for rejected aspects of self while the parent pretends to be “moral,” “spiritual,” “adult,””and “forgiving of parents” while continuing in denial, and projection, of the harm done to his or herself.

Alice Miller’s work is mind-blowing, heart-opening and highly-recommended. She lends deep insight into how our most intimate relationships generate the kiss-up,  kick down dynamics of the imperial cultures we are born in .  We live in a “culture” where we get well-trained to protect parents lest they feel anything uncomfortable about how they treat their children. 

Meanwhile any find it perfectly normal to expose children to violence, isolation, abandonment and shame. It remains normal to speak and act harshly with children while begging, bowing and kowtowing to tyrants, and those who do, or profit from, their bidding. Few of us recognize that the greatest experiences of violence, cold-heartedness and fraud most of us have had happened with those “closest” to us. In the inversion of natural values that empire – “imposition” in Latin – relies on, the most common “family” model insists on protecting parents while exposing children.

When raised with a bunch of substitutes for the attunement and connection that full human development requires, we naturally look for “alternatives.”  When we’re done with the toys, we go shopping for “spirituality,” especially the kind imported from feudal and caste-based cultures worldwide. This easily becomes another consumer fantasy that, all too often, becomes another source of abuse. Yes, there’s a spirituality of slaves. Most of what’s in the “spiritual” and “religious” section of your bookstore are perfect examples, from the New Age to the Old Age stuff.

I ran the gamut of that.

Then in 1984 I began meeting people walking in traditional, indigenous wisdom ways. Their Way wasn’t about “me getting enlightened” or “pretending to be a shaman.” It was about responsibility for and to MY OWN ANCESTRY.  No cute costumes.  No cute little “spiritual names.” I got invited to face what is happening with me and people like me, especially the “spiritual types,” like me at the time, running as fast and as far as possible from facing reality.

They pointed at me, and the mountain, my EYES, my EARS and my BODY as the sources of my learning. “Yeah, but what’s the TEACHING?” I’d ask. “If you keep your eyes and ears open you might learn something” was one variation of a hundred answers.  “Yeah, but what do you guys BELIEVE?” I’d ask.  “It’s good to pay attention,” would be a typical reply.

Rockman would tell me, “If you want to catch your medicine, you have to catch your poison.”

I asked my teacher a lot of questions over the years I spent around him. He repeatedly reminded me that he had told me everything he had to tell me in the first conversation we had. The rest was paying attention, on my own. Traditional apprenticeship doesn’t happen through asking a lot of questions of someone else. If I have a question that I feel is truly important, then I ask it of myself for a year or so before bothering an elder with it and, in typical “modern” fashion, firing off immediately with my impressions or other questions. 

In Natural Wisdom the necessary information is given much more simply than our sophisticated minds grasp. The in-formation is in-the-form-in-motion, not in the pinball mental reactivity that our deep programming has set up between our ears. Apprenticeship happens when we start asking OUR questions of our EYES, our EARS, and our BEING.

Wisdom is far more simple than our sophisticated minds imagine. You need to read reality. Not just adopt a lot of lofty-sounding bullshit off the bookshelf. Like Rockman used to say, “If you want to find it, it’s right under your nose.”

A Neurology at Odds With Our Natural Intelligence

Slowly, I began to learn by paying attention to the world by Seeing, Hearing and Moving, not by defining and responding to it as if the whole world had no existence of its own beyond my labels, ideas and definitions for it. SLOWLY. Far SLOWER than I ever imagined.  Why so slow?  Because I was in a hurry to “get” SEEING, HEARING, and MOVING as an idea.  I wanted to get “the secret,” “the trick,” “enlightenment.” I wanted to keep bullshitting myself with a thousand detours  that avoided what was right in front of my EYES, right by my EARS, and within my ABILITIES.

The neurology of a person acculturated to imperial culture is a very convoluted structure, very skillfully trained to deny our Natural Intelligence AND FOR VERY GOOD REASONS. Slowly, I began to learn connectively, not just descriptively or definitionally.

As I started paying attention, I’d realize what he had said; “OH! THAT was what he meant by that!” Often, my comprehension was delayed by decades because of my tendency to cogitate over everything instead of opening my senses. I wanted to define things instead of paying attention to them. I wanted to create a better mental model instead of making a richer, deeper, more sustained sense-able connection.

Realization is Far Simpler than We Like to Imagine

Every realization was precisely as simple as what Rockman had said. I had to go to the reality of things. Spending massive amounts of time in ONE place, especially places with few domesticated, modern humans and lots of undomesticated, Naturally-Intelligent LIFE, oriented, connected and related to the immensity of Living Reality, over months and years, awakened my senses to how Aliveness actually unfolds. SEEing, HEARing and MOVE-ing are not a “bigger, better idea.”

Rockman told me, “When you realize how simple everything I have been teaching you all along is, you’re going to be really pissed that you wasted so much time.” That’s true. I’d discover things right under my nose and say “Damn! I missed THAT all this time?! How OBVIOUS!”

A lot of times I have people who come to spend time with me and they have read every spiritual “philosophy,” done all kinds of courses, have all kinds of ideas about life. I talk about what’s obvious, REALLY, REALLY OBVIOUS. This reality is very Beautiful and Mysterious if you pay attention to its Living, Breathing Reality. Many people say, “Wow! You make it so simple! You show me things I never even imagined, but they’re RIGHT THERE!”

I don’t make it simple. It IS simple. Out of Simplicity emerges Extraordinary Complexity. Take this on as an idea and now you’ve got more “cosmic non-sense” to fill your head with.  Take it to your senses and you discover that the Door has always been open. 

Look at the reality of things, especially the realities so many of us think we’re going to be “spiritual” by trying to run away from them. Dare to observe the impolitely obvious. Few of us imagine that most of us are NOT living in reality.

We live in our ideas of things, in an “idealized, imaginary, and non-sense-ical (not connected by way of our senses) impression” of the world that we are trying to navigate along with the impression that “this world doesn’t make sense.”  If we really, really listened to what we, ourselves say all the time, even wrote it down, and then searched out the sense of our own words we’d be blown away by the crucial wisdom hidden in our confusion. The very essence of the wisdom that we, in that moment, are most in need of.

TRY IT!

When Rockman told me that I had never SEEN, HEARD or MOVED, he meant that literally, at the most basic level. Few modern people realize how dampened our neurological awareness is. Tens of thousands of hours of television, stupefying instructional programming by rote, and an enter-tain-ment anti-culture literally “corralling the mind into non-sense” where the obvious truth is considered impolite has us develop, neurologically, in very strange ways in relationship to our sense-ability. This is the perfection of enslavement, where the non-sense-ical, reality-refusing and dissociative relationship to everything is already conditioned by children’s parents unwittingly and in the insistent refusal of responsibility for real consequences that future generations will not and are not escaping.

This was not some far-out Casteneda-ish teaching. It was very down to earth, and SIMPLE.

In the imperial programming of citizen-slaves to sense-less-ness it somehow escaped me that true under-standing awaited me from right under where I was standing.  If I parked my ass on the Ground and paid attention, I’d be far closer to under-standing than by grabbing another book off the shelf.  That doesn’t negate the value of reading, but only if you  can bring what you read to True Under-Standing.

To get the sense of what was said, I had to use my senses . This was not about me “getting somebody else’s teaching.” The teaching was everywhere and anywhere I was at.

I had been deeply programmed to not learn. I could read or hear something and repeat it. I thought that because I had developed exceptional skills at acting just like a tape recorder, that that was “learning.” Our natural capacities to SEE, HEAR and MOVE are very skillfully and scientifically deadened in the acculturation and indoctrination of conquered peoples.

“Your poison is your medicine.”

I wondered: what does that mean?

Traditional teachings are not given to make a meaning. They are given to make sense. Nobody else can make that sense for us. It’s up to us to do it; with our senses. Pay attention to your poison. Pay attention to what you’re running from or what other people are running from when they’re around you.

Then develop a sense of humor and curiosity. Quit pretending you’re somehow not both fucked up and a perfect, adaptive expression to a culture that is both biocidal and sociopathic. Get it that most of you both want to “be happy and healthy,” even “enlightened,” and continue to shit in the water that the people you “love”are going to be drinking. Start with what’s obvious about real life, like the water, and pretty soon we come to real under-standing about our “love,” our “life,” our “spirituality,” our “enlightenment” and our real relationship to what is actually living.

We Hide Our Secrets from Ourselves

I can get all involved with “the Takelma word for poison is the same as medicine,” and “it’s the same for this, that and those people.” Fine. So what?!

I’m not Takelma, nor will I ever be. The real questions which affect my life aren’t about this, that and those other people, nor are they about the Takelma People, or being Takelma, or trying to be Takelma. They are about me and my people and how we relate to reality, and each other, and ourselves, and even our cells, right now. It’s about how I relate to reality.

Where’s my poison? What does it taste like? Where does it live? What do I do with it? How did I get it? How do I hide it? Where do I hide it? What does it do?

Most of us do everything in our power to avoid our poison or the poison in our culture. Most of what we call “spirituality” in the West is precisely this sort of avoidance. This is perfectly understandable.

Many of us are heirs to a whole toxic waste site of ancestral poison that hasn’t been properly acknowledged or dealt with in many generations. Much of it got sown into us while in the womb and after birth.

Initiation into capable adulthood means discovering our response-ability with regards to poison. This may take cleaning up our own messes, even ancestral ones that we didn’t make, but not only inherited, but actually embody.  I call it Joining the Ancestral Mop and Bucket Crew. Look beyond blame, shame and guilt and grab a mop and bucket and clean up the crap. That’s one crucial aspect. Being adult means we get to grow up and parent ourselves. Then we get to clean up the messes that are going to deaden the lives of the generations to come and which deadened the lives of those who preceded us.  It is not exactly “charming,” in that consumeristic way we are so used to.  But it does develop a deep sense of humor, of love that actually does something loving for life, of orientation to reality and some real skills that do good for something bigger than ourselves.

Poison Isn’t “Bad.” It’s Poison.

Poison isn’t “bad,” in that moralistic sense we have been deeply trained to interpret everything as. Poison is toxic. It has qualities. Those qualities are real, and consequent, even useful. Poison can be profoundly destructive. Sometimes that’s useful, too. Maybe you need to concentrate and treasure that poison and put some on some arrows. Remember: destruction is an essential part of the Life cycle.

The other thing Rockman pointed out to me, when I started learning with him, is that “this teaching is amoral. It’s not about good or bad. It’s about responsibility.”

That sounded catchy. I still spent a few more decades stuck in my own moralizing before seeing it and seeing beyond it. True learning is a literal growth process. It happens with connection and attention. Then those connections inside ourselves begin to grow. It’s a LIFE process. It takes time, contact, maturity, good nutrition, stimulation and relaxation.

“Getting beyond moralizing” is not a new morality. You either do it or you don’t. Either way, you’re still perfectly edible and Life will still swallow you alive, right? It’s your trip.

Ignoring our poison is consequent especially in our relationships with those whom we pretend to “love.” We “love” our children, nature, health, learning, freedom and being good neighbors, don’t we?

Look around and you’ll see that a lot of the people around you are all fucked up thanks to the people who “loved” them the most. We “love life,” don’t we? Water is essential to Life, isn’t it? No water, no life. If we look at what is happening with the water, and the life of all the Beings who live in the Water, we’ll know exactly what our “love” does to life. We start paying attention to the water and we’ll know the nature of our “love” beyond the pretense of our “love.” Simple.  Impolitely direct. Dare to get curious about that – and about YOU..  Gain the skillset to move beyond blame and to enliven yourself and those around you.

Finding our poison doesn’t necessarily mean getting rid of it. It means coming into a response-able relationship to it. It means exiting protracted childhood.For many of us, that may mean actually facing the developmental steps from our childhoods that remain for us to complete, learning to complete them, to equip ourselves to eventually face reality in its totality, and not just the “tooth fairy” version we like best.

If you’re still child-ISH then it’s up to you to lead yourself to become fully child-like, and then adult.

“Spirituality” Without Poison: a “Society” Without Adults, or Elders

Much of what masquerades as “spirituality” these days has no poison to it; no capacity to truly acknowledge, use and/or transmute the Sacred Gift of Poison, to make it the medicine that it is, the medicine that can heal us, even protect us, personally, familially and societally precisely where we need healing, to be brought back into wholeness, with all our parts included, including the poison and the pain which, in the cultures of uninitiated adults, get hidden in the hearts of children and of conquered and traumatized adults, along with deep blame, shame and guilt about even mentioning it.

Without our poison-as-medicine, we get a society without true adults or elders. This is part and parcel of the developmental crippling that all imperial systems impose on their citizen-captives. The poison accumulates for future generations to deal with, while grey-haired, permanently child-ISH (and never childlike) men and women remain impotent to even speak coherently to, much less lead us skillfully through, anything truly tough that’s going on. Instead, they offer nice-sounding platitudes. Young people know instinctively that there’s something missing.

Courage is “heart-FULL-ness.” It is a natural expression of People either raised by mothers who opened their hearts in a profound welcome-to-BE, through attunement, and autochtonous People who get initiated and reborn in the Ground of LIFE and tap into our source of true under-standing. That is not an idea.  It is not another “costume” to put on. It is not another “Joseph Campbell mythological moment.”

The reality of “catching our poison” is about as far from pleasant as we can get and still be physically alive. It literally dis-members our child-ISH self-involvement. Our narcissistic person, our self-enchanted mask, gets destroyed.  Our only option to continue in LIFE is to Re-Member ourselves in connection to the entirety of Life. It doesn’t just connect us to healing, it also reveals our response-abilities to killing, and the price paid, every day, by every Sacred and Related Shape of the Aliveness that nourishes us, and the price required to actually protect, nourish and defend our children instead of coming up with another grand, cosmic, chickenshit theory about “why reality doesn’t matter.” Our Presence here has a Price. The entire Fabric of Aliveness is paying that Price. Functional adults become willing to pay that price along with everything else ALIVE.

Becoming a functional means becoming part of the Living Deal of Living, ALL of it, instead of insistently dodging it while shopping for “our good deal” and ignoring the very raw deal that the young people who are heirs to a legacy of cowards are now facing, without even any functional adults, much less elders, to speak honestly about what they already know! 

What are we Offering Back to the families and communities of Shapes of Aliveness that Feed Us?

In a culture of uninitiated “adults,” we ignore how this plays out in our lives and in the lives of those who follow us. We live in disconnection from the consequences of our actions. We do the same thing with our poison as with our trash: we concentrate it and we bury it. We bury it in the futures and the hearts of our children, and of the people “down the road, somewhere, where the dump trucks go.”

Much of our poison is unconscious.

Many people think that reality is all make-believe, that what we ignore no longer exists; at least not for us. To the self-involved nobody else really matters, not in a deep, responsible, lucid way. This is the kind of narcissistic idiocy that has overtaken the world. Instead of looking at this from a place of accusation, we are challenged to understand this reality developmentally.

“We’re doing the best we can” is a very nice-sounding cover-up for cowardice and ignorance, and an anti -culture where nobody calls anybody to excellence, lest they be offended. Calling ourselves and each other to excellence necessarily means noticing how and when and with whom we are lukewarm, half-hearted and half-ass.

We pussyfoot around the obvious while spouting off on grand “quantum” theories why “nothing really matters anyways.” If it did matter, we’d be called to account. Many of us spent our entire childhoods with adults wagging their fingers at us, instead of bonding deeply and richly with us. We have some pretty deep “calling to account trauma.” As adults we generally avoid being called to account even more than as children. This doesn’t make for great relationships, friendships, parenting or even childhoods – but so what – “everybody’s doing the best they can.” Right?

Once again, there is that profound existential and relational inversion that a squirrel wouldn’t survive one single day indulging in: “protect the adults, expose the children.”

And we are.  Once again, these are developmental conditions.

Right now we live in cultures where parents want to be protected from any criticism while they continually rag on their children. Protect the parents; expose the children.

Bob Dylan’s got a song, “Who tells you when you’re wrong?” Who can YOU count on to do that for YOU?

Our Challenge is Structural

Our conundrum isn’t moral; it’s structural, it’s developmental, it’s neurological and relational. We have developed frustrated neurologies that are challenged to deal with reality. Living Reality and Living Consequence are not what we adapt to. Instead, many of us adapted to the relational disturbances of frustrated pseudo-adults that were not in a healthy relationship to their own Aliveness, Feelings and Sense-abilities, and thus felt threatened by ours.

Many of them didn’t have trustworthy elders to guide them, as adults. Many of us didn’t have trustworthy adults to accompany us, as children, and celebrate our magnificence, our natural sociability and genius. We adapted to being shut into rooms and staring at lit screens and thinking reality is “a better description,” not a richer attention.

In a way of being together without the plain truth of the impolitely obvious, we all become isolated, spiritually and sensually castrated, with relationships powerless to orient us in the impolite and amazingly beautiful obviousness of reality. No one is held to, or holds others, to account. This is the culture of “nice,” … but fake. We’ve been gang-pressed into adapting to this culture, since childhood.

I’m not saying that or order to lament it, although I do lament it.  But facing the reality includes facing our natural ability to honestly lament what destroys our well-being.

Once again, these are developmental conditions.. I’m saying this in the spirit of “Hey, folks, are you seeing what I’m seeing? Can you SEE the nature of this labyrinth that we are not only in, but that’s inside of us?”

Why Young People Avoid “Adults.”

Many young people prefer spending hours playing video games to the insipid company of “adults” whom they intuitively recognize as fakes, as not-quite-adult, not really, reduced to persons (Latin for “masks”) incapable of facing the poison that’s already lodged in their hearts and that’s lodged at the heart of the anti-culture they are waking up to while the adults around them pretend that “this is just what it’s like to be human.”

Initiation into adulthood is not one more “badge of honor” that little Johnny comes home with. It’s the burial of “little Johnny” and the birth of an adult. That adult is no longer “cute little Johnny.” He’s gotten “bit” by the Tooth of the World. He’s gotten a real, in-the-flesh taste of Consequence. He’s got his poison and he knows the power that poison has, as both a medicine and as straight poison. He might need that poison, and need to use it skillfully, not carelessly.

For me, running around with Indians was a way of avoiding my poison. I had some elders very clearly point that out. “We don’t have your poison,” they told me. “You have to look for it in your life and in the Way your people come to be this way that you’re running away from. Dare to look at what you do as a white man and as white people, and find out who your ancestors were and what they had to make their way through and you’ll be a lot closer to being natural and truly adult than you will ‘trying to be an Indian.’”

In 1989 I moved to Colorado and started doing my own inner housekeeping.

Catching My Poison and Running Like Hell

When I caught my poison – or rather when my poison caught ME – it was only in hindsight that I realized what was happening to me. My teacher laid out the trail markers for me. But in the moment it was just pure, raw, painful Undoing.

Few of us imagine that realization comes hand in hand with disillusionment.

You don’t get to wake up and stay in “fantasy land.”

Some of those “moments” lasted the better part of a decade. I resisted what was ALIVE in me. It scared me. I scared me. I had heard that “your poison is your medicine” but I didn’t want the poison I got, which was my poison, the poison of my “people” and had none of the charm, romance or pizazz that I thought would come once I “got my medicine.”

I found Love with that poison, too. REAL LOVE. NATURAL LOVE. WISE LOVE and FIERCE LOVE. Not that castrated, powerless, Kumbaya fantasy love of the sixties. Love that knows what’s real, what’s true, what’s loving, and what is NOT. Love that’s got heart and soul AND tooth and claw. Love that’s got a sacred space and a fierce perimeter.

When I found my poison it had none of the “glory” that I thought would come with “waking up.” It’s like the universe handed me a mop and an invitation to join the Ancestral Mop and Bucket crew and start cleaning up the messes that care-less ancestors had buried in my heart, in my world, and to start cleaning up messes that I was already making all on my own.

There’s nothing glorious about this; it’s simply necessary if anything like a Capital-P People are ever going to emerge among the cellularly, relationally, socially and economically challenged people of the modern world.

We’ve all got messes to clean up. That’s our medicine. That’s our gift. This life is our gift. Not just the one we receive; the one we leave for those who follow, the offering we could make, instead of just leaving a toxic crater behind us and poisoned springs for our children to drink out of.

The poison is our gift, but we have to come into right relationship to it. I know it sounds crazy, but none of what I’ve offered you in these articles is going to make sense until you really get the spirit of that. Otherwise it’s simply too poisonous and traumatic.

Every modern human has been poisoned and traumatized in ways many of us aren’t even remotely clear on and which are NOT normal for Natural Human Beings, but ARE normal for conquered human beings. It’s what keeps us in this conquered, “human resource” state of “being,” but not really BEING.

It’s what keeps us in constant pursuit of some new distraction to keep us from feeling what we’re really feeling. It’s what generates huge markets for anti-depressants, stimulants, pharmaceuticals, drugs, distraction, techno-toys, tobacco, and endless “spiritual shopping” with every teacher and teaching as consumable and disposable as the water is to us. Get that and then we develop the courtesy of chewing on our own questions before cheaply asking someone else to give us their answer.  Every question we ask has the answer hidden right inside of it, and “shopping around for someone else’s answer” is just another way of staying infantile, because in these times the real answers are as thoroughly inconvenient as what we do to the water, and what reality requires to leave something different than a legacy of ignorance, illness, enslavement, and death to those who follow us.

Most of what passes as “spirituality” today is the pursuit of a “way” of continuing to abuse actual, real life while trying to “feel okay” about that.  It is the spirituality of slaves, of those who refuse self-mastery in REALITY.

Living “On Hold.”

Most people today are waiting for “something” or “someone” to do something to improve their lives. They are stuck “on hold,” in permanent dependence. This is precisely what slavery is: the refusal of, or incapacity for self-mastery. What are you waiting for? When are you going to DO it? Who the heck do YOU think was born to live their lives for YOUR sake?

These are the results of neurologies that grew up forced to shut themselves down, and need some chemical help just to achieve a functional level of neurotransmission. Otherwise the signals simply don’t connect. The epidemic of depression, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, Attention Deficit Disorders all reflect a developmental state of neurologies that developed to shut themselves down. Few of us can even imagine that our “everyday, normal state of being” may be imminently suppressed.

Response-able adults start cleaning the messes, even if those messes got made by one or a thousand of our ancestors. It’s not about blame, shame and guilt.

It’s about the possibility and response-ability with which we can welcome the next generation into a way of Life that doesn’t set them against their own Innocence and Sense-Ability from day one. It’s about the possibility of a child drinking water that isn’t going to kill her. It’s about a possibility of LIFE that somehow completely escapes the logic of this relational, life-deadening illness we call “culture” today.

Graduating From Fake Spirituality

In the very heart of my abscess of poison I discovered my Innocence, my Fierceness, my Anger and my Love. They were not separate things. I discovered a pissed-off 7 year old, and a Natural Sense-Ability that I had to shut down to navigate a childhood around physically and emotionally dangerous people. At 7 years old I knew that my mother’s help was not on the way, and I made a very conscious choice to survive and make it through the violence of my father. I quit crying.

I could take whippings that raised black and blue, bleeding welts all over my ass and legs and tough it through.

I spent my entire life betraying my sense-ability with precisely that which I called “spirituality.” You may notice that every “spiritual” tradition from slave-holding and caste-based cultures discourages the use of our senses.

I come from “Slavic” people. The word “slave” comes from “Slav.” The “Slavic” way of treating children comes from slavery. Almost every Slavic man I know also knows this kind of childhood, while almost entirely ignoring its relationship to slavery.

It took me 37 years to find my tears again. They scared the living daylights out of me, along with my capacity to FEEL. I discovered how fake I was, in spite of my efforts at “being real.” The “I” I thought I was crumbled in the light of the impolitely obvious of what I SAW of what and how I really was. I wanted to run in shame from that pissed-off child in me. I ran for the better part of seven years. I was scared shitless of the fierceness of my own Innocence, Feeling and LOVE and RIGHTEOUS ANGER. At every turn of my artful dodging my Innocence stared at me from my CORE, which comes from the Latin cor: “heart,” challenging me to have a heart, OR DIE.

I did Tai Chi, I did all kinds of Chi Kung, I tried to “transmute hate into love, anger into peace” and all kinds of NON-SENSE- the avoidance of sensing my actual experience. What all of that amounted to was trying to bury my own Aliveness in the name of “being alive.” That Medicine in my Heart finally said to me, “If you try to bury me, change me, fix me or do anything other than embrace me and learn from me then you will DIE.” I got two powerful tastes of death, then another. After seven years I quit resisting my sense-ability.

Once I quit resisting, things came together very quickly and naturally. They came together, they came back into sense-able relationship. I discovered what True, Natural Love is, hand-in-hand with True, Natural, Fierceness, which is one and the same and forbidden to all slaves and to all children raised in the way that slaves raise their children: under constant external interference, direction, interruption, correction, distraction, dissociation and violation of their will, their sense-ability and Natural Intelligence and Wisdom.

Realization Comes With Dis-Illusionment

We are woven of Truly Spectactular Stuff. I found my compass for navigating Living Reality, not fantasy. Disillusionment is part and parcel of Realization. If you want to get real you’re going to have to give up the pretty-sounding bullshit.

Things got grounded in a very real way. I got my bearing on EARTH; the EARTH under my feet and the EARTH that I am made of. I began to get EARTH LOGIC, LIFE LOGIC, the logic of Panther’s World, as my teachers call this world we live in. We’ve been spectacularly acculturated to ignoring it.

We live in lucky times for people looking for medicine, for healing. We’ve got many generations of poison stored up for us, and plenty more on the way. Poison is part of the adventure. Most people will run as fast and as far away as they can away from it. I did. Even after I got it.

Some day we are going to learn how to become competent, skillful, careful adults again, or we are going to fill mass graves. This is a natural reality: humans don’t get a free pass on ignoring natural consequence. We don’t get to degenerate, self-sabotage and cripple our youth, fill our world with oldsters who never became functionally adult, and deaden our world, indefinitely, without consequences. Whatever our opinion, wishes or desires are irrelevant without response-able attention and action.

Still Shopping for Your Spiritual “Good Deal”?

Today’s “consumer spirituality” has us always shopping for the “good deal” while avoiding the Real Deal, the Whole Deal, the Beautiful and Living Deal that every Shape of Aliveness has with the entire Fabric of Aliveness. There are a lot of people, worldwide, and many other Shapes of Aliveness, paying the price of our “good deal.”

Adulthood is a capacity in reality. We gain the capacity, or we remain children. What is that capacity?

There are a lot of ways to say it, but the saying is without power until it’s matched by doing. That’s what initiation is for. Any initiation that’s “optional,” that’s given as a “workshop” or “course” or “idea” isn’t one. True initiation puts us up to a wall that we either find the opening in, or die; just like birth. What comes out the other end is fundamentally different from what came before; just like birth. Part of what’s different is that we lay claim to, and develop response-ability for, the treasure of our Sacred Poison, instead of leaving little messes everywhere for someone else to clean up while pretending that we didn’t.

Gaining the capacity to turn our personal, familial, ancestral, social and cultural poisons into medicine, into treasure, into something truly sacred and noble, necessary and a-part-of-Living transforms our relationship to the entire Fabric of Aliveness. Gaining the capacity to recognize the power of poison and use it straight, also transforms who we are in relationship to Life.

We are no longer the “Kumbaya fantasy-land New Age castrata” preaching a “peace and love” that love and offer peace to tyrants and continually oppress our own children.

Replacing Blame with Response-Ability: It’s Up to YOU

We no longer blame our parents, culture or circumstances, nor do we protect them from our truth or make excuses for them. It’s our Journey now and WE ARE UP FOR IT. We LEARN to parent ourselves and the coming generations skillfully. We embrace our challenges as the meaty and hearty stuff of Growing More Alive. We develop response-abilities. That’s what apprenticeship is.

In enduring life ways, that haven’t destroyed their own social fabric and entire surroundings, everyone, but a slave, is in a lifelong apprenticeship. True, seasoned elders carry wisdom that can spare us, and our descendants and neighbors, a lot of suffering, useless detours, and clue us into the elegance and artistry of being competently and ever-more-fully ALIVE.

It’s Our Garden now and it’s up to us to tend to it and response-ability means that, before we start “doing things in the Garden,” we pay deep, sustained attention to it, discover how it unfolds in its Living Intelligence, and learn as much from those who have more experiencing caring for it. It’s about coming into relationship with the other side of our “good deals” from a place of response-ability.

When you have an opportunity to “catch some of the poison” of your life, pay attention, pay respect. To re-spect comes from the Latin re: “again” + specere: “to look.” To “respect” is not some reverential emotional state. It is another look. Notice how the sense of so many words, like “respect,” has been replaced with emotionality. To truly respect is to look again.

Respect yourself. Look again.

In modern culture, most children are not getting the good, living, connected deal that will allow them to grow into their fullness. They are getting had, and will grow into the sort of “developmentally-abbreviated adults” who will spend their entire lives looking for a “good deal” that never quite satisfies because their parents were “too busy” to give them the quality of sustained, grounded and response-able attention that does satisfy children and support them to develop fully and in connection.

“Quality of life to an infant-child means only one thing: complete unconditional acceptance and emotional nurturing on the part of a permanent caretaker. We have the most emotionally deprived children on earth, separated from parent at birth, and continually separated as they grow. Convinced that we are giving them what is most important, a high standard of living, we overload them with material goods to compensate for the love and attention we deny them. We work to earn money to buy these goods, leaving little time for the child already isolated.

So our heaping goods on the child to compensate for the love and nurturing they don’t get keeps the wheels of industry turning. And around it goes. Each child grows up to intensify the cycle in their interaction with their own offspring. It’s an insane spiral toward chaos, sponsored and encouraged by a society based on economic games in which a few winners are bought at the price of masses of losers.

Meanwhile we build more and more prisons and accuse our young of moral failure for not becoming what we are not.” – Joseph Chilton Pearce Amazing Capacities & Self-Inflicted Limitations: An Interview with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Few of us suspect that it’s our poison that heals! To heal means to make whole, it’s to have all our parts, to be complete, to embrace the Complete Deal and to engage in a vital way with the totality of Living Reality. Embracing our poison does not necessarily mean turning it into something else. Just acknowledging its existence is a huge step. It, too, serves a function.

When we respect our poison, we look at it. Then we look again. We taste what and how we are, the people we come from, how we got to be the way we are in this place. Then we find REAL medicine for what ails us and those whom we love.

The Full Flavor that Trustworthy Adults and Elders Have

True Poison is True Medicine. It gives us the kind of full human flavor that Trustworthy Adults and Elders have. When we find our poison we become a Full and Round Gift of True Wisdom; the capacity to find our way in the Entirety of Reality and Consequence.

If we want True Medicine, we have to catch our Poison, to go to the heart of it, and the place where ancestors who dodged their own poison stored it up and hid it: in the hearts of their children; OUR hearts, and in the heart of the rest of Aliveness, reduced to a “resource” from which we expect to extract an endless “good deal” whose consequences we prefer to ignore. You may think that I am saying that our parents did a “bad” thing.

Catching our Poison isn’t necessarily only personal, familial or cultural. It also implies being aware of Poison at play in larger dimensions of our reality. No Natural Human Being will live long by ignoring other beings who are poisonous or toxic to his or her existence. As modern human beings, however, we’ve been acculturated for thousands of years to tolerating the presence of poisonous human beings masquerading under all kinds of titles; popes, presidents, emperors, saviors, gods, saints, priests, scientists, professors, doctors, kings, etc.

We are trained to have a very similar relationship to often-abusive and deceptive persons wielding these titles as we do to “parents,” and often for very much the same reason, and from the same neurological structures.

All of us are shaped consequently by our primary relationships. These shapes and relationships then unfold in the rest of our relational development. Becoming adult means taking responsibility for the whole package we carry. It’s not about victimology. It’s about responsibility. It’s about taking ownership, and even artistry, for our consequential presence. Not blame, not shame, not guilt: it’s about developing a skillset and caring fully. It’s about grabbing that mop and bucket instead of waiting for someone else to clean up the mess.

Becoming Functionally Adult is NOT a “Good Deal.”

Becoming competently adult is not a “good” deal. It’s the FULL deal and the Whole, Beautiful, Real and Living Deal with the entirety of the Aliveness on the other side of our “good deal.” It’s a spectacular adventure. Life invites us to embrace it in its fullness.

Our poison isn’t any great mystical thing we have to search far and wide for. It’s far closer than that: far closer than comfort. Most of us carry all kinds of shame, guilt and blame over our poison. We’ve learned all kinds of “games” to cover it up. Our so-called “spirituality” is a great cover-up. Just ask yourself what being unspiritual is for you. Then dare to feel everything you’ve been told and subjected to around being exactly that: unspiritual.

Get curious, open your senses, let your heart have a taste and see if you don’t get a taste of where your medicine’s waiting for you inside.

If you have children and can’t find your poison, just pay attention to how your children behave: they have adjusted to YOUR behavior. Watch how they treat smaller children and animals, whether they share or not, what pisses you off about them. You’ll get a taste of what you had them adapt to; either by your presence, or by your absence, and farming their neurologies off to televisions, video games and unrelated “adults” to raise.

Many parents teach their children real early on to protect YOU from YOUR and THEIR truth, and how to content themselves with lies. If you want to get real about your poison then face the reality you avoid, and the lies you tell about it.

Find Your Way

In the Way of Your Aliveness,

Your Real Aliveness,

The Way and the Condition It’s In Right Now

Before You Try “Fixing” It,

And Putting Yourself In a Fix, Again.

Gather Seeds,

Face Dawn Light.