Gabor Mate's new book The Myth of Normal came out last week. My hardcover copy sits inches from my hands as I type this. It's a thick boi. Over 500 pages and hundreds of citations.
And his book's topic deserves every page.
There is a spiritual wound at the center of our culture.
Like all great shapers of culture, our wound is a story.
Whether or not we explicitly agree with the story, the story runs our institutions, universities, economy, and our personal cosmologies.
The story goes something like this:
The universe was created by chance. God is dead, and only fools try to resurrect her. Our new god, (that we refuse to acknowledge as a god), is economic; and we all worship, everyday, as we swipe our cards and work our jobs. The temple of Wall Street has one fundamental dictum; infinite growth, and their sacred texts are Quarterly Earning Reports.
Eventually, as you worship, you will get sick. When you do, because you are a machine, we will change your fluids or replace a part, so you can get back to workship.
Your chronic physical diseases or mental illnesses are not because our Culture is toxic, it is because your genes made you this way.
Psyche is not real. Intimate and authentic human relationships are not fundamental nutrients. Your imagination is not a divine aperture into the truth of reality. Creating art will not heal your diabetes or autoimmune condition. Creating art is something only some people do, and most of them are fools.
Your dreams are random and meaningless. Your connection to a spiritual dimension of life is, at best, a comforting story - certainly not a fundamental nutrient.
Your troubles, your illnesses, your mental pain - they are not created by you, for you, to guide you towards transformation. They are random acts of decay delivered to you by an uncaring entropic universe.
Swallow your meaningless and get back to your workship.
-- -- --
There are other stories.
And we can try them on and experience how they caress around our existentially adrift shoulders.
Theres a story, supported by science, validated by experience, that heals where our current story harms.
There is a story that offers that the universe was born through, and is eternally guided by, Love. Some call it Evolution -- that from the first birthing moments of our universe, particles sought to connect with each other. Through their connection, atoms were birthed, like children, and that this dance of love eventually birthed Earth, and Earth birthed us.
That God is not a being, but the entire uni-verse; the symphony who's center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere. The God song sings through you, and you hear it has your passion, your dreams, your interests, your art.
Your illnesses, physical and mental, are not by chance. They are created for you, by you, to guide you to your next transformation. That letting go of resentment can heal cancer. That admitting and integrating your anger towards your father can heal your autoimmune disease. That feeling your grief for your unlived life can lift your depression, and playing outside with friends can alleviate nihilism.
That money is a tool, not a god. That genuinely helping others will provide you meaning and money; but that infinite growth is cancerous, and humans highest duty is not to grow every quarter, but to be evolutionary stewards of the planet that birthed us.
There is a story that merges the body and the mind and reclaims Bodymind. That everything is vibrating with the song of God because you imbue it with the song of God as you apprehend it. This song sings that intimate authentic human relationships are as fundamental to our thriving as water, that the human condition is sacred, and capable of transcending previously believed impossible obstacles.
That your dreams are sentient messages from an ancient intelligence who is always guiding you towards more novel God notes.
This new story can be glimpsed in Mate's new book. It can be felt in the psychedelic renaissance. It can be heard in quiet moments of creativity and flow. It can be tasted in vulnerable conversations and love-making.
We get to choose our stories.
I believe the second story is more true than the first because I've watched the second story heal people.
I've saved my life with it.
I believe it is only a matter of time for the dominate story to be replaced by the second story, simply because the second story works.
People in the second story are blossoming, and their loved ones who are still in the first story are getting curious and asking questions.
I believe in us. May you choose stories that heal you. May you live them passionately and share them with us. May we know a time where we can sit in circles of gratitude for how the first story brought us all to the second.
Song on Repeat This Week:
elysian opening by tstewart
Quote I’m Dancing With This Week:
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. If you do that with these eyes for instance they will cease to draw you. You should never try to make the visions come again. Think of it in your imagination and try to paint it. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewer. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
-Carl Jung
“A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he longer has any dominating representation collective (religious ideas). His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordiante idea.”
-Carl Jung
“If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a collective human being combining the characteristic of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at its command a human experience of one or two million years, practically immortal. If such a being existed, it would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to it than any year in the hundredth millennium before Christ; it would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owning to its limitless experience, an incomparable prognosticator. It would have lived countless times over again the life of the individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it would possess a living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay...Unfortunately — or rather let us say, fortunately — this being dreams…”
-Carl Jung
My Favorite Journal Prompt This Week:
Which story am I living today?
Gotdam Erick 👏