Disciplines:
While I first want to acknowledge the wisdom with which you started and ended your last essay drop, what I am most inspired to explore at this time are these two quotes:
1. Which healing is best to start with: internal, interpersonal, or systemic? Or is trying to divide and rank these three just a reflection of internalised white supremacy culture?
2. Thinking about the fractal nature of relationships, our first relationship to ourselves defines every other relationship we can have. What I observe in Indigenous Worldsense is that everyone is assumed to be an artist, whether that label is used or not. What made us human was not merely standing upright, but dancing once we stood; not merely speaking, but singing once we had speech capabilities. Creative self-expression is the core of what it means to be human. Maybe that's the best place to start.
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The first of your quotes above contain questions I have posed to myself at different moments of my life. My responses over time reveal the varying degrees to which I have been able to embody concepts like interdependence and Yowa (one of many words used by the Tsalagi for “God/Creator/Great Spirit/Oneness/Unity Consciousness/All That Is”).
As I contemplate a response to your powerful curiosities and brilliant insights, I recall that most of my writings have not been straight forward regarding my foundational understanding of reality. Except for some private communications, I have avoided sharing my spiritual worldview because 1) it is still in development and 2) might be perceived as out of alignment with theories of change that have emerged from social justice movements, and consequently embroil me in energy-draining intellectual debates with people I want to continue to love. I find at this juncture in our colab that I can no longer avoid sharing the heart logic that informs my ideas about personal and social transformation. So here are some key beliefs underpinning my literary explorations and my ideas about personal and collective healing. I hope they are meaningful to you.
Everything is an expression, fractal, perspective, aspect, reflection and projection of Yowa. Everything and everyone is Yowa. There is nothing but Yowa. We are all characters in the dreams of Yowa.
As Yowa, we have created limited avatars of ourselves, humans who have forgotten what we are. We did this for the same reason we like to watch spoiler-free films in a darkened theatre: we want to experience the ups and downs of a story without distractions or foreknowledge.
To have an experience, polarity is necessary. Otherwise, there is no experience, no awareness, and no creativity. There is no experience of tall without short, hot without cold, dark without light, good without bad, right without wrong, female without male, yin without yang, gender without gender fluid, etc. We use whatever we encounter on the continuum of polarity to define ourselves and form identities. The experience of self-awareness is simultaneously the point/moment of polarization. “I am this, NOT that.”
Polarization serves Yowa’s desire to have experiences. Experiences can expand or contract our consciousness, out of which more experiences can be created. Thus, the Universe breathes, expanding and contracting like everything and everyone of which it is composed. To mix metaphors, the oscillation of positive and negative charges are what creates electrical current and electro magnetism, forms of power essential to life that wouldn't exist without polarity.
Polarization is also an expression of Yowa, and there is no value judgment applied to any form of contrast. The in-breath is not better than the out-breath. Both are necessary for respiration. Likewise, the negative has no more value than the positive. All polarized positions are valued because, ultimately, all experience is Yowa, exploring itself/ourself.
As an aspect of Yowa, I am either responsible or co-responsible (with other souls that comprise the human collective) for everything that occurs in my life. To the extent that I create or co-create a challenge, it is for the purpose of giving myself and the collective an experience that fuels the joy of creativity and expansion of consciousness. Since everything I create is an expression, fractal, perspective, aspect, reflection and projection of me/Yowa, then all of my challenges and joys are equally desired by my soul. “I am this AND that.”
There are limits, however, to what my physical self can create. Those limits are determined by my level of awareness. The more my awareness expands, the broader my imagination. The broader my imagination, the more my awareness expands. The soul desires to expand and create. That desire is present in all of creation. You might say such desire is the “core of what it means to be”. So, we crave experiences that inform both creation and expansion.
We humans experience the world of matter through our physical senses – or the tools and equipment we make to enhance our senses. Sensory experience is one of many types of experience one can have in reality. In the material world, we tend to rely on our physical senses to provide data to help us create our experiences over a lifetime. But the world of matter is only a tiny fraction of reality. The vast majority of reality is nonmaterial. One of the challenges we give ourselves as humans is to sense reality beyond the world of matter. This is not a decision made in the thinking brain. It is a desire inherent to the nature of our collective soul and we each go about this inquiry in our own unique ways.
As we reach out beyond the physical capacities of our senses, we interact with reality outside the material realm. This can be done through spiritual practices, psychedelics, certain plant meds, and even dreaming – though a growing number of people are coming into the world naturally gifted with such abilities. Nevertheless, as we experience more of nonmateriality, our consciousness (awareness of reality) grows. With those experiences, we continue to create and expand the Universe. Hence, every experience we have is, in some way, a projection of ourselves – as individuals and as a collective.
In sum, these beliefs inform my understanding that all forms of inequality are challenges humanity has given itself to power our individual and collective expansion of consciousness. We are all connected. As one individual expands, we all benefit. It’s like turning the light on in a dark room. Until recently, lighting up a room full of people who were sleeping might get you kicked out of the room and rightly so, because we all need adequate sleep. As more people awaken, their eyes adjust to the light. Now it’s mid-morning in a new room. You might be the one who opens the curtains but most welcome the illumination. Another person might flick the switch and add more light. Someone else might turn on a lamp and even further enlighten the space.
There are always some randos who want to dim the light so they can go back to sleep but someone will ramp that light right back up because we all have stuff to get done. Whether we act on instinct or intention, the outcome is a brighter and brighter room that our eyes adjust to. We become increasingly capable of differentiating colours and objects we could not previously perceive in the shadows.
At some point, even the person sitting in the darkest corner is going to be bathed in bright light. When we expand to the point where we recognize and embody interdependence and oneness, the games of inequality that we play at this level of consciousness cease to be fun and challenging. There is no growth that comes from such games anymore. We created inequality to point us toward oneness. Once we achieve that level of awareness, we will move on to a more challenging game for our ever-expanding consciousness.
Each of us is slowly realizing that inequality is an exercise in separation and self-deprivation, regardless of which side of the polarization we are on. Architects and defenders of inequality sit in the darkest corners of the room. Though they may sit on golden pillows, a human being suffers more in separation and loneliness than in any other kind of experience. Some might decide to take the scenic route to that conclusion, but humanity is ultimately moving toward the same destination.
In the process of enlightenment, as the dominant belief system of supremacy, separation and materiality is exposed to light, the civilization it informs collapses. All the institutions of capitalism, colonialism and inequality implode. We are watching/causing this to happen. It is happening slowly because our collective consciousness is wise and knows we need time to process and integrate each disclosure of depravity, corruption, and horror. Nevertheless, we are in civilizational decline. Things could devolve but probably won’t if enough folks are aware and intentional enough to start building the new and more expanded civilization while the old disintegrates around us. As we co-create the new world, we will find our artistic self-expressions are divinely/self-organized. Each of us is uniquely equipped with the inspiration and gifts to fit specific puzzle pieces together, even though we currently have no idea of what the finished picture will look like because we are still co-dreaming it.
