The task of saying something useful…

The depths and degrees of orientation to engagement.

There is a beautiful story told by my friend Ari who passed away this week after 92 years of living service to planet Earth. He was a Sri Lankan and global peace activist, among many other things, and the story has to do with a certain remarkable moment when he was instructed by an otherwise mysterious cave yogi to take some seemingly impossible actions.

Sadly, perhaps even terribly so, I won’t be able to recount that story here, at least not well as it was just once, and many years ago that I heard it in informal context from the good Doctor.

The essence of the story however, is more the point, a particular illustration of depth and degree of orientation to engagement.

At the time, Ari was engaged in some level of activity of community development which necessitated certain things to transpire at the levels of government bureaucracy in order to make shifts in context which would allow particular community initiatives to flow and thus flourish.

Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country, as you may be aware, and so it was natural that there should be some local lore regarding this cave yogi who was known to live in the hills nearby. This was a person renowned for their meditation and spiritual practice, and also for their general silence and reclusive disposition.

I have always thought of this story as exemplary of acting from a place of intelligence beneath the folds of commonly appreciated reality dynamics. As the story goes, Ari was up against a seemingly impenetrable gridlock in the attempted path of this particular movement of collective effort when the hero of our story steps in.

Apparently, this monk came down out of the hills, an exceptional event in itself, and approached Ari directly with a certain explicit set of potentially ridiculous instructions. I forget the sequence, but there was at least something to do with visiting some office of colonial bureaucracy outside of generally accepted operating hours and making a request that should, in conventional terms, be exceptionally unlikely to be met.

Long and broken story short, everything fell into place, as if miraculously and the task was accomplished.

Clearly, it seemed, this yogi was working at a certain depth with clarity in degrees of orientation to engage, and effectively so.

This story begins to illustrate what appears to me as a spectrum of inquiry; when defining the boundaries of a certain task orientation, we are also implicitly working with depths and degrees of viscosity. In other words, depending on the orientation of our efforts, i.e. towards what are we intending solution, varying degrees of construct emerge as relevant to the application of wisdom and strategy.

Seems simple enough? [Scratching head, tongue out, cross eyed and giggling…]

In any perceptive engagement there seems to be in operation a certain strata of viscosity, and our work in a given moment is likely to relate to one, and possibly more, particular depth(s) of that spectrum. Above that depth, we are dealing with objects, perspectives, and strategies of leverage, and beneath that we are dealing with context, terrain, design criteria, or conditions of engagement.

On one end of this spectrum we have the profound, transcendent, and unspeakable Tao, the unnameable divine, on the other end our own unique first-person, distinct, and immediately practical application of effort in one discrete moment.

The other day, someone asked me if I was an artist and when I replied that that was probably a good way to put it, they asked me to elaborate; “tell me, if you would, more about what you do.” She said.

Our time was brief, and so in reply, I offered essentially the following…

I'm as much a philosopher. 

My current focus is to look with a multimillion-year lens.
At our state of our human evolution. 

And ask questions about what kind of understanding can we lean into with that? 
That talks about the pain points of our lives today. 
And how do we craft a coherent inquiry into that at that scale? 

What kinds of injunctions does that invite that actually have meaning and can act in an experimental way? 

My thesis is that an individual human being can, in the words of Yogananda, self-realize. Or can become enlightened or become awakened. 

I'm curious, what does that mean if we apply this at the species level? 

So it's art. It's philosophy. 
It's trying to make a business in the world today as the world is. 
It's all of these things.

“… A lot to unpack there.” Came the reply. Undoubtedly so. Which brings me back around to the thesis of this article.

In regard to the unpacking, the task of saying something useful is, in itself, nontrivial.

Humanity today comprises so many incredible spectrums of orientation, disposition, ideology and identity, and ultimately sense of direction. In one sense, it appears as though the earth spins just one way, spiraling around this one star, on a journey circumnavigating a black hole as this galaxy tumbles on the streams of the super cluster we call Laniakea. Objectively simple, one marvelous path for us all. :-)

However as far as we simple Homo sapiens are concerned, we might say one end of our spectrum is held down by the techno-optimists who demand simply faster, forward, more; immortality and singularity or bust! On the other end of sensibility we might find those indigenous families living far from a modern mayhem and patiently waiting to play cleanup after this drunken bash blows itself to smithereens.

Orbiting around that axis, we might envision a field of imagining, a spiritual inquiry comprised of expectations of rapture or enlightenment or even just an inanimate matter giving up the ghost illusion of consciousness and spinning on into oblivion.

For me personally, this “I” consciousness represents a kind of chaotic strange attractor. Awareness arises, infinitely regressed within itself to the point of perfect stillness; oscillating within that field, varying degrees of fixation on “being Kabir,” and simply pouring into the bliss and love and compassion that tumbles, realizing itself in countless forms of samsara and nirvana (suffering confusion, and divine perfection.)

And this Kabir, like all names, lives in an ocean of relationship, one moment to the next, one instance of care and seeing, concern and leaning in, fear and trepidation, all weaving together in a fountain of wellbeing and passing away.

And so we return, to the task of saying something useful.

For my money, such as it may be, I doubt very much the wisdom of “faster, forward, more.” At the same time, evolution has boomed to the tune of 8 billion humans having washed over a planet, no longer contained by bioregion, but atmosphere instead. By this metric I wonder also what may lie ahead from such a potentially fecund field of experimental elaboration.

I find myself longing to come into a sufficient communion with a wide spectrum of viscosity and emergent possibilities. I do not imagine that such a task can be very usefully accomplished in the traditional discipline of the solitary philosopher inspecting, critiquing, and elaborating beyond the views of others, nor that of the solitary artist offering, however profound, the unique and sovereign sensibility of beauty into the fray…

Our friend Tyson has presented me with the idea of “right story,” to refer to a human narrative that exists, not solipsisticly in the mind of hubristic man, but in community, durable over time, and subjected to the existential pressures of natural law in reality-bound ecosystemic context.

Therefore, in the cacophony of 8 billion humans making our various response to the modern evolutionary and existential pressures at play, I wonder aloud about the disposition, the asana that allows the purest music to emerge from my soul, the song that attracts the sacred community, perhaps the Bright Alliance envisioned by Mr. Diperna, the sacred ritual constellation to form in ceremonial response to the timeless moment across scales, to collaboratively evoke a certain emergent scent of majesty to flow like perfumed pollen into the wild turning of this planetary wonder.

Each day we rise and step into engagement, such as we are. We move to make things “better,” if only in our own sense of security and well-being, though most likely beyond that into the inter-being that we are. From very many compelling perspectives this human world is beginning to shake evermore violently and those of us that wish to see wellbeing flourishing through the turbulence find ourselves called to find and care for what deepest streams we may of that essential goodness at play.

If I am thirsty, I need simply dip my lips to the stream, but what is in the water?

I am not at all sure I have said something useful here, though perhaps at least this effort will help to cut away some of those clinging words that might obscure an otherwise clear song.

May you be well and happy. May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all beings be well and happy and free from suffering and its causes.