Might the Sickness Be Shedding Light?

Post-Activisms connection to modernities obsession with "Health".

“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything…
That’s how the light gets in.”

-Leonard Cohen

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I have been dealing with respiratory issues my whole life. As a small baby I was rushed to the hospital and treated for pneumonia. Since then I have gone in and out of hospitals the world over due to recurrences of pneumonia, asthma, bronchitis and similar lung-related challenges. Just yesterday, I left another hospital, in Thailand, for the same reason. Modern society would have me believe something is going wrong, that there is a doctor to blame somewhere, a company to sue. We have been taught that life is but a relatively comprehensible mash-up of reproducible systems that the experts have miraculously managed to figured out fully, and that if we just follow the proper protocols we will surely be healthy, happy, safe and secure. But what if this not only isn’t true, but by very nature of cosmic design, isn’t suppose to be true? What if a healthy ecosystem is suppose to be messy, unpredictable, chaotic, lacking security and even, at least as defined by modernities neatly trimmed, sterile race of well-manicured “experts”, unhealthy? To me, this is at the core of what post-activism is.

Modern education suggests that there are clear answers. That if we follow the course and work hard we will get a good job, find the perfect life, the perfect mate, know the glorious victory of good over evil, of justice. If we just vote for the right person, do enough homework and fall in line, take the right medications, eat the right foods and pray to the best god, we will surely succeed. Yet spend any time away from the cookie cutter suburbs of empire and you quickly learn than the wilds of reality follow a very different law, one more aligned to Chaos and Chance than Law and Order.

This is not to suggest that there are no benefits to discipline, that after observing methods demonstrated by elders who have been examined closely over time who clearly possess beneficial traits ought not be mimicked. We would be foolish to not learn from what works. Yet life is not so black and white, right/wrong, etc. Which is why the Buddha taught in 84,000 different ways, because what is true for one is not generally true for all. For some, a classroom with desks, some pencils and pads, standardized tests demonstrating our ability be a good consumer-citizens is valuable. For a farmers daughter in say, Thailand however, such an education is ridiculous. How can someone learn how to plow the fields if they are in a windowless room 5 days a week? The same holds true for democracy, for spirituality, for sexuality, indeed, for well-being. There are over 8 billion people living on Planet Earth currently. Each one seeing reality in a different way, requiring a different language, a different education.

At 42, I am beginning to look differently at asthma. For so long I have seen it as a cruel enemy that needs to be conquered, an obstacle preventing me from being physically able to do what I want. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to defeat this life-sucking monster and have never fully won the battle. Yet, as I age, I am growing weary of the fight. I can see how few days we truly have here in this human form and increasingly, I just want to listen, to feel, to we aware and to learn. So this time instead of solely calling on the troops to attack the demon in my chest I have also meditated deeply, gone inward to see who is there. To ask, Why have you come?

I don’t mean to get too new-agey and woo-woo here. But bear with me, there is some deep value to be found in listening to our enemies, our obstacles and dis-ease. It seems to be a recurring theme recently, in many arenas and it behooves us, I feel, to take note. Maybe this dream-like, in-between time we are all living in, fraught as it is with countless societal breakdowns, failing institutions, crumbling infrastructures, climate chaos, wars and rumors of war, etc. ought not be viewed as a series of battles, but as rare and profound opportunities for rest, reflection and deep listening, whether this takes place with our actual seeming enemies, or with our sicknesses, with our own bodies and minds…

You might be wondering what this has to do with post-activism? Everything. Our attempts to “fix” the worlds problems have historically been intimately woven into the fabric of a certain modern view that, similar to how we compartmentalize subjects and try to oversimplify diseases and symptoms without widening our periphery enough to view the much greater, interconnected, intergenerational connectedness of un-born, indestructible unfoldings, is preventing us from “solving” anything at all. Activism itself has been hijacked by this narrow view. Thus, the sickness gets worse. Not because we don’t have the right cures, but because we lack the right View. What if their is no sickness, at least not as it is currently understood, but instead, wrong view?

It seems, in my case, that I have not been as open to life as I had thought. Modern narratives have most of us so forgetful of the deeper, more subtle realms of human experience that few among us seem to know that more is even available to us beyond the materialistic surface of civilized consumer “culture”. Even those of us who have managed to escape the thick upper crust of it aren’t totally removed from, what American philosopher Ken Wilber refers to as “flat land” grasp. Even though I myself have been steeped in fringe cultures for decades I still find myself stuck in the shallow whirlpool of cyclical thought where I have been spiraling around ceaselessly, splish-splashing about in an unbalanced, overly intellectual pool of wrong view (that I have been convinced was right view) that has resulted in a form of suffocation that has prevented full receptivity of oxygen in my lungs, and life’s most precious gifts.

Evangelical Christianity made me afraid of sex. So when I was young, well-fit, energetic, care-free and fresh I rarely expressed this important part of myself freely. Those who denied Christianity altogether made me fear that all religion was bad so for years I missed out on the beauty of sacred surrender, adoration and devotion to a higher ideal. As I aged, the strange ethics presented to me by the American West made me give most of my time over to “work”, as defined by unseen forces who have very successfully convinced us what respectable “work” is suppose to look like there. While I was young and could have been pleasantly “wasting” my days away, fully devoting my hours to absolute emersion in Gods great beauty, I was instead forced to be in a school, and then forced to work 40 plus hour work weeks and then spend all my parents’ hard earned money on college which made me feel guilty, knowing that my parents had essentially given up their entire lives so that I could “succeed.”

It wasn’t until much later in life that I finally realized how important it is to, well, to do nothing, to sit aimlessly and just be, to enjoy my body, to enjoy other bodies, to enjoy the body of earth, of space, and to rest. So much pressure put on us all to do something, to be successful in the eyes of the very people responsible for destroying the world. So much socially constructed pressure clamping down on my lungs. And the lungs of the Holy Mother Earth. Suffocating the collective mind. Our hearts. Right View…

“I. Can’t. Breathe.”

You might recall the article I shared a month or so back about Feeding Demons. In that piece we explored the ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice of Chöd. Recently I have been exploring this practice in myriad ways. Not only when challenging emotions arise, but with sickness, with aversions and afflictions of all kinds. Post-Activism seems to be asking us to challenge our conditioned responses. What seems to be being asked of us now is simply to become more aware, which I have found to be much more powerful than merely listening. To be truly aware. Without judgement or any intention whatsoever to solve anything or even offer hope. To do nothing more than be fully present is to touch, to merge with. To see the demon, the sickness, the obstacle, the regret, the shame, the grief and know not only compassion but empathy. To willingly journey deeper into the shadow and cultivate a genuine relationship with what has been historically deemed unwanted. Unwanted or not, it’s here. How can we learn to dance with this beautiful mess, with no purpose other than loving awareness?

Here in Thailand thousands of well off ex-pats (which is really just a snotty name white westerners gave for “immigrant”) come in droves to the most pristine beaches in the Kingdom, set up fancy yoga schools, raw food restaurants, host ecstatic dance festivals and erect stunning bamboo shalas for doing breath work and ayahuasca and cacao ceremonies and all the other popular methods the worlds elite currently dable with when seeking to avoid deeply rooting into ones messy reality back home, where the real work resides, waiting for us to finally, hopefully return, to stop running away and stay put long enough for something to grow... Well, many of these wonderful, (they are wonderful! Most of ‘em anyway!) well-intended “influencers” spend most of their days posting on social media about how healthy their life is, how free they have become and how their “followers” could also be as liberated and beautiful as them if they only signed up and payed for whatever version of culturally co-opted “well-being” fad they are offering. Interestingly, you rarely see any actual Thai people in any of these sexy posts. Why? Because this mad infatuation with “well-being”, where sexy, forever young people from wealthy countries can buy out beautiful beach towns and transform the local fishing market into a trendy açaí bowl serving coffee shop is not healthy for anyone but the ex-pat (i.e. new-age colonizer). Its colonization, baby. It’s cultural appropriation. It’s gentrification. It’s all that. It’s “wrong view” and it’s making it hard for the world to breathe. Luxurious festivals and oceanside healing centers that cater only to the super sexy that won’t allow for the myriad other ways of being to sneak their poor, uncouth unpredictability into the one cookie cutter view of what health looks like as defined by the super spiritual California elites are just as responsible for transforming our diverse planet into a monoculture of thought as is any other Monsanto/Amazon/Military/Pharmaceutical endeavor.

Throughout my travels, arguably the most healthy people I have met were the Kham nomads of Eastern Tibet. They only took showers a few days a year. They wore the same thick yak robes every day. They only slept a few hours a night. They were sexually promiscuous (and not in some weird “kink” kind of way, just a messy raw human kind of way). They were wildly alcoholic and generally only ate yak meat and butter. And, they were the most vital people I have ever met, the most happy, adaptive, easily forgiving, welcoming, physically healthy and yes, spiritually woke. In the bitter cold, they sat up straight in the pre-dawn hours joyfully praying, chanting mantras and meditating on world peace for hours. They managed to make time to feed the animals, the children, each other and the unseen spirits all around, every day, all while laughing. Oh they cried too, and at times, when life’s inevitable losses got to be too much, they were even violent. But they were real, and vital as hell. They had no açaí berries, no muddy mushroom drinks, no cacao and no kale. A mystery, I know.

Now, I’m not suggesting we should all become drunks who don’t bathe, who swap wives and eat only meat and butter. As for me, I love a good açaí bowl, strive to be vegan and prefer a monogamous life with my one wife. But I wonder, have we become too rigid in our ideas regarding what constitutes as “health”? What is healthy for one is just simply not healthy for all. It isn’t. Humans are magically complex. We might even discover that we find more health by being a bit more messy, more forgiving, more inclusive. By allowing ourselves to sip a few more glasses of whisky, by cross- pollinating a bit more with “the other”, by learning to listen deeply to the wheezing in the chest instead of always fighting it. What is it telling us? Maybe She is suggesting we loosen up and allow more stories to be heard, more friends to cross the border.

I heard during my recent travels in India that there were villages throughout the subcontinent, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that erected small temples to pay homage to a deified manifestation of the virus. Instead of viewing “her” as a monster, she was instead revered, respected and seen as a sacred teacher offering timely wisdom. Could our cancers, our asthmas, our beer bellies, gray hairs, sagging breasts, wrinkled skin, graying hair, etc. all be seen as elders coming to offer timeless, greatly needed teachings? I wonder what we miss when we try to make every body look the same, vibrant and fully alkaline? For the planet is far more than this. We absolutely must strive to heal our planets soil and ban the world of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Of this there can be no question, yet so too must we allow room for Chaos and Chance. We are not in control and when we think we are, we are at risk of missing the teaching.

How addicted we have become to comfort. And how narrow our view of what comfort is! As if the ultimate goal is to die alone in a castle on a hill somewhere with a big wall around us. A very uncomfortable thought. Yet strangely, we seem to have become very comfortable with this kind of discomfort, allowing this peculiar thought cycle to keep spinning around, generation after generation. To be modern, is to need more space. Yet all this space makes us lonely, as we push all the annoying obstacles away. We don’t want the wild animals in our back yards, no bugs to crawl on our walls, yet we claim to want to “re-wild”. We have to get rid of every impurity. Either by vaccination or a 100% raw vegan lifestyle. Same same, but different. Well, it’s going to take far more than relocating our favorite hipster cafe to a pristine wilderness area to do that. And no amount of walls will ever fill the void in our heart, that undying yearning to connect, to spill over and merge. Nah, it’s going to require us to surrender fully, finally to the Great Sickness of Modern Thought all together, and do so long enough for us to come to terms with all that has been lost so that we can admit again, as we have done so before, as once humble humans able to breathe deeply, for so much of our long, long Story, that we are but temporary flowers on a vine that was not put here for us.

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I end this weeks offering with a generous offering from my teacher/sibling/fellow fugitive, Báyò Akómoláfé:

“To the exhausted modern citizen in the throes of grief and pain:

Remember you are not alone, though the sermons of an 'oppressive obvious' press a different take on your skin. To these stentorian voices that preach your isolation, remind them that you are not alone - and this is not because there are others around you, but because you are already made of others. You are not made of capital letters. You are lowercase fonts that straddle the entire page. You've never successfully been a category. You are how bodies travel; you are the middle of a compost heap, the intelligence of the ancestral.

Stretch out your arm a little, and you'll find it is held up by more than just your volition. Try to sit perfectly still, and then listen to the fleshly syncopations within your chest that resist your attempts at solitude. Deliberately blink your eyes, and drown in the realization that if you were responsible for keeping your eyes moist, if it were left to you, to your plans and your careful calendaring, you'd have lost the plot a long time ago. There's a generosity attending you: a prior generosity. Even the capacity to feel grief, to be torn asunder in the face of so much suffering, to wonder what it means to be human now, to feel exhausted with the tensions afoot, is the generosity of your body in its excessive spillages.

And finally, think of the mighty blasts of pain that disable us in these moments as a "becoming-stranger." Less an invitation and more a 'convitation': a sensuous solidarity churning the animal of the flesh; a molecular seeking of and experimenting with an open-ended expanse. The moralities that keep our bodies buoyant are asking new questions in their erotic flows, and you are enlisted in this more-than-human inquiry. There are no stable answers, no quick fixes, no utopian resolutions, no full stops. Just a becoming-stranger. Just the Black Hole's song streaming through the cultivated downbeats of coloniality, whispering openings where the obvious insists on closures.”

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#maypeaceprevailonearth