Ohh boy. I leave for Burning Man tomorrow.
I remember when I was younger I told myself 'I'm never going to Burning Man." That younger self couldn't sit on the floor without having back spasms. He hadn't traveled to another country or gone to a concert. He hadn't learned how to really play, or how to let go of the fear that gripped him and compelled him to try and control his life.
I was afraid of life, my body, and 'losing control.'
But all the while, there was something I didn't understand that I followed (or followed me?).
Since I was a boy, I've been motivated to understand the human psyche to help alleviate the suffering in the human psyche (emotional enmeshment with a parent has gold linings). That desire has saved my life again and again.
The first choice I made that began to pull me out of my walled castle was dedicating to a craft. In college I decided the craft I would hone was writing. I started a blog and began to organize my thoughts. Dedicating to a craft, oddly enough, was the beginning of my spiritual life. The felt sense of insight was my atheistic nervous system's first glimpsing of something transcendent.
Art opened the first hole in my walled castle for the transcendent to enter.
The hole turned to a fissure once I started studying Carl Jung. I realized I wasn't alone in the house of my psyche, that my conscious mind is to my unconscious mind what a boat is to an ocean. He introduced me to the confronting, brutally honest, and loving psychotherapy dreams offer if we listen. The fissure came with his introducing Synchronicity to my psyche.
It's a story for another time, but an apple in the middle of the road, for a brief moment, brought all my walls down and I stood in naked awe at the totally enveloping, ego terrorizing, soul replenishing grandeur of 'I have no idea what life is."
But writing and Jung were not enough to get me to do things I was afraid to do. I didn't drive. I didn't date. I didn't travel. I didn't do explore life. I didn't play.
My life was study, books, writing, and hiding.
I use to weep in the shower on my birthdays. My birthday gift to myself was to stand under the shower head and remind myself of everything I hadn't done yet that I felt ashamed of. The stories centered around sex, success, status, titles; but there were also deeper yearnings. In the privacy of my own heart, I knew my choosing fear was hurting something sacred in me.
The last year I wept in the shower on my birthday was Jan 1st, 2016 (I had a good decade-long run).
I know why this was the last year that happened. I made a vow to myself with the kind of devotion only religious language can begin to touch in 2016.
1. Speak the truth and trust that whatever happens as a result is the best possible thing that can happen.
2. Do what you're afraid to do, especially if your Daimon asks it of you.
The reason I have the kind of nervous system today that can not only go to Burning Man, but feel excited for it, is because of these two vows.
My eyes begin to water as I connect to how many times I had to drag the boy who would rather cry in showers on his birthday than feel fear...into fear. Driving, psychedelics, first dates, exposing my stutter to podcasts and live audiences; traveling to the jungle to do plant medicine, hosting events and workshops and speeches. Opening my heart to the kind of love that eats our egos.
As I look back at what has brought me here, I see a pulsating golden thread weaving my life together.
There is an ancient philosophical idea that the highest virtue is 'The Good.' According to these philosophers (Plato, baby), the fact that reality is intelligible to human experience at all, and that the promise of continued intelligibility is inexhaustive is The Good.
This might be the best description for the god I believe in, and this is the god that has brought me out of my fear of life, into my play with life.
I believe in The Good. I believe that in every moment there is a through thread that is something like a song, and it sings to us. Telling the truth increases the clarity with which we notice the song. The song lands in us as the Daimon. Acting upon the whispers of the Daimon brings us into harmony with The Good. The deeper we step into the song of The Good, the deeper the degree we bring our immediate experience into the fold of The Good. Jung called this dance rainmaking.
I've found The Good in heartbreak, betrayal, disappointment, physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain, in my anger, my terror, and my grief.
Whats interesting is, when I let fear guide me, I couldn't discern The Good. I couldn't hear the song. It wasn't until I stepped away from my desk, from behind screens, and into the wild living fuck of life that I began to hear her song.
I'll dance with The Good this week at Burning Man.
If you haven't, I invite you to play the game for a month that you will:
1. Speak the truth and whatever happens is the best possible thing that can happen.
2. Do what you're afraid to do, especially if your Daimon asks it of you.
See what happens.
I love yall.
Song on Repeat This Week:
The Soil - Unspoken Words
Quote I’m Dancing With This Week:
"Thought chang’d the Infinite to a Serpent, that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and Man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night: then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths, rolling in circles of Space, that like an ocean rush’d
And overwhelmèd all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the Serpent temple form’d, image of Infinite,
Shut up in finite revolutions, and Man became an Angel,
Heaven a mighty circle turning, God a tyrant crown’d"
-William Blake
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.”
-Carl Jung
My Favorite Journal Prompt This Week:
What ideas have I crown'd tyrant Kings in the realm of my psyche to protect me from the call of my human soul?
Zak Stein talks about pre-tragic consciousness and post tragic consciousness and these are very different and that thought came up for me when I was reading your well written peice. I enjoyed it very much. It seems that you finally had enough tragedy, that it broke you open. Is that accurate?
Thank you. The song and Jung quote hook lined me at the end there.