Your Ticket May Win You a Shetland Pony
True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent. Interwoven with arrested personal development, and perhaps inseparable from it, our everyday lives have drifted vast distances from our species’ original intimacy with the natural world and from our own uniquely individual natures, our souls.
mmmmmmmmmBill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul
It became clear to me early on, as Sally and I dove fully into our journey of discovery and research that coalesced into What a Way to Go, that if nothing else, as I face into the shitstorm that is Empire’s end, I get to be sane. (We might define sanity, for our purposes here, as “relating to what’s so as what’s so”, keeping in mind that “what’s so” is an ongoing process of discernment and revelation.) Sanity, as far as I can feel and see and know, is part of my birthright as a creature born onto this planet. It’s one of the gifts bestowed upon us by the Cosmos. And though the culture in which I was born and raised and live in still seems bent on depriving me of that gift, I mean to have it. Without that act of reclamation, that demand, that achievement, any response I make to our present predicament is bound to be rooted in delusion.
It’s getting more and more onerous for me to interface with the dominant culture. Delusion is the water in which we swim. You can see it everywhere and anywhere and elsewhere and right here, well-documented and critiqued in Guy McPherson’s recent blog, Scale, and in Keith Farnish’s latest at Culture Change, Time to Decide What Matters. The depths of our cultural insanity astound.
But that’s the easy part, seeing the delusion around us. Political whores and corporate shills and media morons and those crazy fuckers across the street who scream at each other in the middle of the night and that glaze-eyed lady we see walking down the road every morning make the delusions easy for us to see. We read McPherson’s piece and nod our heads in agreement as he outlines the absurdities of modern agriculture, our reliance on fossil fuels, and the outright silliness of our suburban lifestyles. We marvel at a species that would foul its own nest to the point of self-annihilation. And we sigh and shake our heads at just how twisted, how lost, how separated, how wounded we have become as a people, born and raised in a culture that has shed all connection with common sense, justice, reality and spirit. The notable thing, to me, about Bill Plotkin’s quote above is how many times I’ve read words just like these in the literature of collapse. For those who have awakened to our collective situation, these observations soon fall into the category of “the obvious”. It is a wonder, as easy as it has become, that there are people that do not see what we see.
But, as I keep saying, that’s the easy part. The harder task is seeing the delusion we carry inside our own selves. While we’ve gotten better at acknowledging how wounded we all are, the vast majority of us steadfastly define “we” as “everyone else”, each of us starring in our own remake of The Omega Man, each of us having somehow escaped the delusion virus. (Quick Math Lesson: If each of us is correct, then none of us is delusional. Since we carry the culture inside of us, if none of us is delusional, then neither is the culture. In that case, our culture is sane and whole, everything is fine, you need read no further, and I’m going to hang up my keyboard.)
I think we can safely say that the fundamental ability to acknowledge our own woundedness is the sine qua non for our journey into true adulthood and elderhood, both as individuals and as a culture. And so I’m going to go a step further than Plotkin et al., step right into the “politically incorrect,” and say that not only have we ALL been deeply wounded, stunted into what Plotkin calls “patho-adolescence” and driven into delusion and insanity by the culture of Empire, but that you have been. You, sitting there in your office reading this while trying to look busy. And you, surfing the net at home, looking for some way to deal with the paradigm-shattering news of Peak oil and climate change. And you, the seasoned doomer with the righteous resume of analytical articles and blistering blogs. You have been deeply wounded. You have been kept infantilized and distracted. You have built and are strongly defending a delusional ego structure. You are carrying the insanity. You.
You.
Did I say that out loud? It’s scary, to say such things in public. Please, somebody, stop me before I hit the “publish” button!
My immediate ego reaction (and that’s a bit repetitive, as one of my working definitions of ego is “our reactive self”) is to moderate my fear by trying to soothe you with the admission that Sally and I include ourselves in this assessment. We have been as deeply wounded by this culture as anyone. We carry delusional ego structures too. And I could further soothe you by pointing out that we all carry delusional ego structures, pretty much all of us who chose this moment in time to be born on this particular piece of material reality. My fantasy is that if I include myself, and make sure you understand that it’s really everybody, then you won’t hate me.
Whew! Close call.
But if I say that, well, we’re right back where we started, to that easy admission that we’re ALL wounded, aren’t we? It’s ground we’ve already trampled. Safe. Familiar. Easy. And that’s not really my point, is it? Whether we are all-in-the-same-boat or no, you are still delusional. And that’s the what’s so that you’ll have to face, I think, iffen ya’ll wanna get some o’ that-there adulthood stuff.
You see, I don’t think you or I need to be soothed. I think we need to be pushed and challenged. It’s how we grow, isn’t it? It’s how we learn. We face into those places where we’re stopped, those things we do not know, and we push through them, into something new. And isn’t that what brought you here, to these words, to me? You’re looking for something new.
So, yes, you’re insane. Welcome to the club. You carry around an entire suite of delusions and fantasies, from the personal (I’m not good enough.; I’m not smart enough.; I’m just fine the way I am.; I’m not worth anything.; You can’t make me.; I’m too fucked up.; I’m better than you are.; You’re better than I am.; I’m in trouble.; I’m not going to live in fear.; I’m unlovable.; I’m in control.; It’s my fault.; I’m not responsible.; I know.; I don’t know.; I am totally responsible.; I’m a failure.; I’m not enough.) to the cultural (Civilization is humanity.; There’s never quite enough.; We have the one right way to live.; More is better.; We can solve any problem.; The way to be happy is to own more stuff.) to the Cosmic and spiritual (The physical world is everything.; We are to subdue the Earth and have dominion over it.; Humans are innately flawed.; Humans are superior to all other creatures.; We own the planet and her resources; This is all illusion so I don’t need to feel anything.). These delusions, and many, many more, have seeped into every nook and cranny of your being.
Madge! Civilization?
You’re soaking in it.
And we’ve been soaking in it for all the days of our lives.
Yes. Too much daytime television as a kid. Good eye.
Now, you might retort that, “Hey, not me, bro! I’m fully aware of the world situation, the crazy stories of Empire, and my own wounded ego, and am doing the ongoing work of stepping beyond these things.” To which I might say, “Of course you are. I’m not talking about you. You already know that.” The mere fact that you’re reading these words can be taken as evidence that you have awakened to the insanities and limitations of the dominant culture, the manner in which those insanities and limitations have impacted your own worldview, and the precarious predicament those insanities and limitations have brought to the entire community of life on this planet. No doubt such Imperial stories as perpetual growth is good and we can do anything we want have long since flaked away from your soul.
But remember what I said about that being the easy part? While you bask in this possible exemption, you may want to stop and ponder whether, in fact, I am talking about you. I know from my own experience that the human ego is an exceedingly slippery beast. It will fight like hell for its continued existence, using anything and everything it encounters for its own preservation, even twisting psychological healing and spiritual growth to its own ends. It’s possible for one’s ego to be fully convinced that it is happily busting itself into oblivion while, in fact, it is doing nothing of the sort. And it may be that any talk whatsoever of ego-busting is just more ego, the ego trying egoically to rid itself of itself. It may be that the only thing ego can do is to surrender in the futility of opposing what’s so and, in so doing, create an open glade into which our souls can appear.
Jane! Stop this crazy thing!
Ego is a master of invisibility. It can sometimes take quite a while to unmask its presence. Forced to give ground and retreat under the assault of our attempts to dethrone it, ego tries to reorganize around whatever else it can. Like a demon freshly exorcized, desperate to find a new host, ego jumps from one rule to the next, one habit to the other, one principle to its opposite, from fixing others to fixing oneself, from hierarchy is good to hierarchy is bad, from I’m not smart enough to it doesn’t matter if I’m smart, frantic to find some dark corner in which to settle and hide. Because ego wants certainty, regulation, routine, and belief, it totally misses the point of what Eckhart Tolle calls “ego diminishment”. It replaces an old story, now bankrupt, with a better, truer, story, never grokking that the point is not to live a truer story, but to live with no story as True (including the story that no story is True). Jostled into our awareness by challenges and feedback from the outside world, lying exposed and vulnerable in the bright light of what’s so, ego reveals itself for the phantom it really is. Your ego can only reign supreme when you think it is you. Unmasking ego, then, can feel like losing who you are. Not something most of us give up easily.
And so I am wary of your retort. The traps in this work are too many, too subtle, and I fall into them myself too often, to take your claim at face value. While the collapse conversation includes a great and growing awareness of the woundedness of our collective ego, I see much less evidence that people are taking this in at a personal level. What I see and hear are claims that I’ve done my work and You just need to love me as I am and I’ve already done my grieving, as if spiritual growth and healing has an endpoint. And I watch the ongoing game of Doomer One-upmanship, as players chide their opponents on what they just don’t get, completely oblivious to what they themselves do not get. (That last sentence being yet another move in the game.) I see reactions and solutions and inventions and admonitions that don’t even begin to probe the fundamental assumptions. If people are diving whole-hog into ego diminishment, I’m not seeing it. Instead, most people seem to be defending their wounded egos as fiercely as they can. It’s as if we think we can somehow cobble together a sane culture from insane individuals.
The good news is that, if you think that you are well into the diminishment of your ego, there’s a simple way to test that claim: Put yourself into an intimate community, or even just a truly intimate relationship with one other person. You’ll find out soon enough.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful novel, Galapagos, he explores the notion of the evolutionary instability of our “big brains”, telling his story from a point in time one million years out in the future, when the remnants of humanity have evolved into seal-like creatures living only on the titular islands. Flippered, furred and smaller-brained, these future humans lounge on the beach, laughing and farting and eating fresh fish, living lives far more happy, and far less destructive, than the humans of today.
How do those big brains get in our way? Well, what I see is that they give us the uniquely human ability to be delusional, to hold onto beliefs and assumptions despite all evidence to the contrary, to project onto others our own fears and wounding, to not see what’s so. And they give us the ability to not feel what we’re feeling, to mistake emotion or reaction, craving or repulsion, for true feeling, one of the most important sources of “what’s so” there is.
Is this a unique human ability, to be delusional? Not sure. If it is, there is certainly a cultural component that shapes its expression, as this ability has found its most extreme fulfillment in the culture of Empire. What I can say is that I have seen little or no evidence (apart from those intersections of human and non-human that have shaped the behavior of the latter as a response to the former, such as domestication, exploitation, abuse, engineering, etc.) little or no evidence of insanity or delusion in the “natural world” of animals and plants and soil and wind and rain and sunshine and starlight. I’ve never seen a white-tailed doe worry about whether she’s loveable or “right.” I’ve never seen an elm tree fretting over his lack of success. I’ve never heard an oyster mushroom wail I’m not enough! I’ve never heard a dragonfly try to explain that the market will solve the problem of oil depletion. I’ve never had a sense that the wind is questioning its right to be here. And I’ve never felt, walking barefoot across the field, any fear whatsoever that the ground underfoot was going to abandon me if I told it the truth of my experience. The non-human world feels eminently sane to me. It’s where I go, when I need a dose.
Now, you’d think that it would come as a great relief, to fully face into the fact that
a) we’ve been horribly twisted and wounded by the insane culture into which we were born and that
b) as a result of that we’ve built up ego structures to protect ourselves from that insane culture and that
c) those ego structures constrain and limit us, leaving us at least partly, and often wholly, responsible for the missteps and sufferings of our lives.
I mean, we can hardly be blamed for the insane culture into which we were born, right? And it’s completely understandable that we would adopt defensive measures in response to the abuse, violence and delusions that surround us, right? And, the fact that we’re actually creating much of the confusion, suffering, and circumstances of our lives is an access point to creating something else, isn’t it? Like, if the circumstances of our lives are completely determined by outside forces, if we’re completely victims, then there’s no hope of ever escaping, right? But if we are, in some measure, responsible for our life experience, including the planetary predicament we face, and we acknowledge that, then we’re able to respond, right? That’s, like, good news, innit?
You’d think. But it turns out that most people fight the notion of their own personal woundedness tooth and nail. Maybe White Guys ™ more than most. And that’s the genius of this insane culture, that it sets us up to do that. It can do that because it’s such a delicate balance to hold, that we are, at one and the same time, victims of an outside insanity and co-creators and full participants in that ongoing insanity. You go too far in one direction and you’re into the shame and powerlessness of victimhood and the blaming of outside forces. You go too far in the other direction and you’re into grandiosity and inflation and the blaming of self. Both extremes are incomplete and easily exploited. The truth, the “what’s so”, seems to lie firmly in the middle, in that queasy and uncertain balance point where seeming opposites must be held together. As Niels Bohr said, “There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” And as Bohr also said, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
If the paradox is that we’re both victim and perpetrator, the progress I see in the heart of that paradox is this: as wounded as our egos have become, our deepest and truest selves, our Souls, our Essences, remain as beautiful and glorious as they have always been, as they always will be. And in the acknowledgement of our wounded egos, we can begin the mighty work of letting them go, of stepping over and through and around and beyond, and of revealing our glorious selves to the world, each of us crafting our own personal apocalypse.
And work it will seem to our egos, (though for our Souls it will come as easily as the sun slipping out from behind a cloud), for we’ve been programmed since birth to grasp firmly to both victimhood and blame. We’re still soaking in it. The church calls us sinners and offers salvation. The psychiatrists call us sick and push drugs. The corporations call us incomplete and sell us products. The government terms us terrorist targets and calls us to arms. Our journey out of ego-insanity will call us to walk away from this culture in any and every way that we can, in order that we might be able to see it clearly, and to find our true selves apart from the insanity. Since the dominant culture is currently proving itself not only unable to deliver on its promises but responsible for the destruction of the natural world that supports our lives, walking away from it ought not be too hard, neh?
So let me explain that title. Sally and I spent a few days down on Martha’s Vineyard over Labor Day weekend at the invitation of friends. On the bathroom wall of the little cottage in which we were staying was an old poster for an upcoming polo match. At the bottom of this poster, yellowed and tattered with the years and salt air, were these words: Your ticket may win you a Shetland pony.
Something about those words caught me, startled me, delighted me, stuck with me. They took me back to my childhood years, to the innocence of my youth, to memories of festivals and fairs, long summers at the lake, to memories of family and friends and the playground that was my world, the magic, the possibility, the opportunity. They took me to long afternoons spent with my nose buried in comic books, pouring over the ads for Edmund Scientific and Honor House Products and the Johnson-Smith Co. and the Olympic Sales Club, dreaming of Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray Specs and midget spy cameras and the Polaris Nuclear Sub, caught up in the promises of wealth and power and fun and glory, only $1.25, order now! I grew up in a world where a ticket could win you a Shetland pony. We were movin’ on up. There were mountains to conquer, and conquer them we would. That’s how it felt.
The journey through my life has since revealed to me, of course, the lies of those promises. But here’s the thing: just because the Polaris Nuclear Sub turned out to be cheap cardboard, just because the Sea-Monkeys died, just because I never got rich selling greeting cards door to door, IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE IS NO MAGIC IN THE WORLD! Those comic-book-promises may have been toxic mimics, as Derrick Jensen might term them, but they pointed toward something real and true and valid. There is wealth and power and fun and glory available to us. It’s just not anything at all like our culture, or our egos, would have us believe. The access points to magic, for me, have been through those anomalous areas that challenge our current paradigm, from quantum mechanics and the holographic universe to new evidence of our misunderstood ancient past to a wide spectrum of topics I refer to collectively as “high weirdness”. There’s a reason so many physicists sound like mystics. It may be that we have no real idea who we are, where we come from, where we’ve been, or what this thing we call reality really is. If we can even use that word “is”.
So let’s tie it all up with a bow and put it on the table. You’re insane. Delusional. Wounded. It sounds like really bad news at first. But when you accept it as a starting point and then inquire into it for a while, it starts to get clear that this is really good news. Acceptance is the first step onto a path unlike any other. A path away from the wounded Imperial ego. A path toward sanity. And with sanity, who knows what is possible? We lose the strict limitations of who we have been. An openness blossoms in our souls. As true scientists, we begin to see what’s right before our eyes, a Universe of mystery and beauty and love and life. The realization that our current minds, our current lives, our current stories, our current situation, our current culture, are all certifiably insane cracks us open with joy, because it means that THEY ARE NOT REALITY. How much worse, to look around at the world Guy McPherson describes and think this is all there is or this is the best we can do.
And that insanity we carry? The insanity of the wounded ego, the delusions about which we are speaking? It’s not a matter of bad chemicals or brain lesions or genetics. It’s rather a crust of stories and beliefs and expectations and behaviors and habits that we plastered over our essential selves, like a skim of dried mud to keep away the biting flies. It’s thick now, to be sure, and hard as hell sometimes. And it’s stuck tightly to our skin. But it’s not like we’re talking surgery or medications here. This ain’t the crazy the dominant culture wants us to believe is crazy. This crazy flakes off with such simple salves as love and listening, dialogue and meditation and healing conversations, with tears and shouts and laughter and rants. This crazy can be disappeared. All we need do is take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last.
It’s your work to do. Just as it is and has been mine. Just as it is and has been Sally’s. Just as it is the work of all who live in this time who are up for the task of breaking out of prison. People looking at collapse say, over and over, that we gotta come together in communities if we’re going to meet the challenges of this time. While I agree that community looks like an essential factor, I would point out that not all communities are doing the same work. While some are focusing on preparation and survival, and others are looking for effective means of resistance, and others are working to minimize the destruction, and while those all strike us as worthy goals for those who are called to aim for them, the community we’re called to envision is one of intimacy, consciousness, truth-telling and deep listening, spiritual growth and evolution. Survival without growth and evolution feels incomplete to us. We feel called to focus on the latter.
It’s our experience that insane egos, running rampant, will destroy this type of community. If we’re serious about this vision of growth and evolution, we have to commit ourselves to the spiritual work of discovering our essential wholeness apart from those insane egos. As it turns out, intimate community itself is a fast-track spiritual rock tumbler for that sort of healing, if we will allow it to be so.
People quote Einstein: No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. OK. I’ll buy that. So, there are many paths to a new level. Which one are you gonna take?
Sally and I have found the path of dialogue, the daily and ongoing practice of helping each other see and defuse our emotional triggers, core assumptions and beliefs, and habitual ego patterns, a valid, rigorous and effective spiritual practice we continue to develop and refine with others in our dialogue circles. So far, it has proved to be both fruitful and exhilarating. It’s a process in which I get to shed more bits of crust, where I get to see and feel new areas of sane essential self, where I can practice the art of relating to what’s so as an ever evolving what’s so, to discover wisdom far beyond my self, and to do this work in a circle of souls who are doing the same. It’s a challenge, to be sure. But it’s also a rare treat, like breathing pure oxygen. It’s the one sure place where I can fall in love with other human beings.
Way better than a Shetland pony.