What’s up beautiful human 👋

Welcome to my first premium piece.

To this day, I remain confused at why we continue to frame our entire life’s work in the limited boxes called careers.

The universe wants to express beauty through us, but first, it needs our participation.

Let’s talk about what radical participation in the evolutionary process can look like.

🌄 The Human Psyche is not Fixed

P.D Ouspensky can provide a lot of insight here in his book called The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution.

He starts out criticizing the modern conception of psychology that says Man is fixed and we're studying him how he is. He writes

What Ouspensky is speaking on here is the fact that you can develop yourself. You can go through contemplative training for a lifetime and experience life in an entirely different way than if you follow the scripts of society and the normal consumptive lifestyle.

The human creature isn't a complete being in the sense that nature only develops us to a certain point. We must take the remainder of our evolution into our own hands even though everyone around us seems to be blind to this possibility.

True fulfillment of human potential is extremely rare in our society. The spiritual narcicissts and those telling us that awakening is on the other end of a spiritual program/masterclass are endemic, where does that leave training.

In my eyes, a sufficient vision has to hold central what man can become and the be grand enough to sustain us through the deepest death/rebirth process possible in human existence.

⛩ Aspects of the Deepest Transformation of a Human Being

🌺 Moving beyond survival

When I look at truly inspiring and developing individuals as compared to people stuck in neurotic loops, blaming, victim complexes, etc. what I see is the different between a downward spiral fueled by survival and an upward spiral fueled by the joy and beauty of existence itself (aka being.)

As Ouspensky puts it, there are two types of motivations.

1. Life itself(survival) — health, safety, wealth, shallow pleasures, fame, vanity, security, and pride

2. Higher order ideals(being) — philosophy, existence, beauty, art, consciousness, truth, goodness

Most people don't distinguish between these two underlying drivers of action and thus take them to be of the same merit. We don't realize that one will place us on an upward spiral into our fullest actualization as a human being and the other will keep us stuck in self-deceptions until the day we die.

When the higher order influences become stronger and more central in one's life then you've finally set foot on the evolutionary conveyer belt of self-realization.

🩸Sacrificing Suffering

It's common to view shadow work as healing all of those dark and negative aspects of ourselves, but I'd propose there's also a shadow on the other end of the spectrum — the golden shadow. Jamie Wheal writes "Our golden shadow refers not to the dark parts we have a hard time owning up to but to the bright parts we are afraid to own. ... [W]e fear our own greatness as much as our failure for two reasons—the first is “How on earth will I keep this up?” and the second is “What will the neighbors think?”

We're afraid of letting go of our suffering, our inner smallness, all the negative emotions that are stopping us from feeling good. To frame it as letting go is an understatement, we need to sacrifice our suffering. It's not easy because many of us have invested the entirety of our identities in negativity — to sacrifice our suffering we'd first have to regress into a period of existential confusion.

A fully realized human being is one that has fully sacrificed his own suffering.

It’s like we get this subtle neurotic pleasure from staying in our pain, fear, desire, pride, and inner smallness.

If we want to attain the highest levels of consciousness that one can attain then we must learn how to feel pleasure/enjoyment for no apparent reason other than the fact that we exist! Ain't that a beautiful vision?

⚒️ Architecting for Emergence from a Place of Radical Agency

We must take more and more responsibility for the world and learn how to avoid collapsing under the pressure of this increased agency.

But what does this responsibility entail?

It entails learning how to more effectively sense what the world needs. And we do this through embodying deeper and deeper states of awakening in our lived experience — mindfulness, introspection, sensing within, and deeper care.

And coupling that with an increased ability to make sense of the world — discernment, cognitive flexibility, a grounded and feedback-oriented metaphysics and epistemology, and critical thinking skills.

🧘‍♂️ A Profound Embodiment of Awakening

To explore this vision we must start out with the fact that full awakening is one of the rarest accomplishments of any human being. It's much more challenging than our commodified, capitalistic version of spirituality makes it out to be. This isn't discounting the power of meditating 15 minutes a day, just recognizing that doing so most likely won't bring one to awakening.

We must first understand the rarity of awakening before we can begin approach it with the necessary rigor.

Second, awakening isn't binary. The Oxherding pictures will help us get a sense of the depth of awakening possible for a human being. From there we can adequately construct the grand vision of human potential that we know is possible.

🏯 Stages of Awakening

The Ten Oxherding Pictures depicts the Zen path towards enlightenment using the metaphor of a young oxherder looking to find, train and tame this Ox, aka enlightenment.

This path ain't for the weak-hearted, folks.

Stage 1 — Searching for the Ox: Making the vow to walk the path, trying to grasp our original face before we were born. We've never lost our buddha-nature but at soon as we develop a little bit of unnecessary knowledge and distinctions we end up strangers to our ever present buddha-nature. Once we get lost in the world of good and bad, right and wrong, worthwhile and worthless, our search for the ox begins. You are falling deeper and deeper into the world of arbitrary labels and attachments.

The path feels fruitless. No matter how long you meditate your mind still races. Delusion runs rampant.

Stage 2 — Seeing the Footprints: After searching for the ox for with rigor you finally see its tracks. After reading the sacred texts of ancient teachers you get little hints of what they're talking about. You get breadcrumbs and no longer feel as lost.

Everything your see, hear, and feel becomes a trace of the ox. The rustling of the leaves on the tree, the sound of the birds singing, all buddha-nature, all dharma. Don't throw in the towel. With a strong determination to follow the footprints day and night, you will inevitably catch the ox.

Stage 3 — Seeing the Ox: The first experience of Kensho/Satori. You finally taste the bliss of mystical experience.

Stage 4 — Catching the Ox: Just getting a glimpse of it isn't enough. You must get a tight rope on it and tame it.

Stage 5 — Taming the Ox: What is called post-satori training. A training of consistent mindfulness in every moment until the day that we die. A full absorption and appreciation of satori. But this isn't where you let up the gas, if you lose concentration for even one moment and let one thought in then many more thoughts will follow.

Stage 6 — Riding Home on the Ox: Awakening is starting to become your normal way of life. You can perform the everyday things of life while living in nonduality. This is when enlightened beings will say — there's nothing to do, nowhere to go. Don't take this as a reason not to train.

Stage 7 — The Ox Forgotten, The Person Remains (Ox Transcended): Once you've attained Satori, you must forget about Satori. You exist in the world beyond good and bad.

Stage 8 — Forgetting Both Person and Ox: Everything fades away. All is you. No need to go back to the monastery.

Stage 9 — Return to the Origin

Stage 10 — Entering the Marketplace with Extended Hands

I don't know about you but I find this explanation of the stages of awakening to be utterly inspiring and magical. It gives me this feeling of "wooowwww," what profound development lay ahead of me in this moment, such a gift.

I feel starry-eyed and humbled, seeing the rarity of going all the way and he dedication that is required to awaken.

This ain't no "you're already there so no need to work for it" deluded shit. This is real. This is challenging. This is the most difficult path one can walk. We must put in the work. We must give nothing less than our very existence.

What no one tells you is that "you have to go into certain transformations in order for certain truths to be disclosed to you." What are you willing to give up to attain the highest truths that a human can understand?

🏣The Absolute Necessity of Schools of Training

Since I've begun backpacking Central America and dabbling in different hippie communities along the way I've noticed how rare a school of human development truly is.

I met so many beautiful human beings on the road. There was a powerful shared ethos of travel, escaping the stories of how life is supposed to be, and pursuing personal development. Yet I found myself yearning for more — to surround myself with a group of people all committed to the deepest death/rebirth process that a human being can go through.

Let me reframe that, I still find myself searching for a group of people willing to take life to the next level, to integrate the partial value of multiple different modalities — one that I barely glimpsed in the communities I spent time in.

These communities were great, but partial. One community would be solely focused on breathwork and ecstatic dance, while another community would be focused on ayahuasca or bufo ceremonies. They were all fantastic in their individual domain, but none were quite holistic enough to handle the full evolutionary potential of the human being.

🥋 The Dojo for the Development of Consciousness — The Religion that's not a Religion

We need to create a new religion. —- Now I know how crazy that sounds, but we have enough failures to learn from and this one won't look quite like the religions we're used to.

Jamie Wheal calls this Meaning 3.0 (1.0 = fundamentalist religion & 2.0 = rationality and logic). We need to combine the meaning found in current religions with the radical inclusion found in humanity's shift towards modernism and postmodernism and combine it into a new way of architecting cultures of meaning.

🌍 Let's create a culture founded on:

Experiences of human connection cultivated through techniques like circling, authentic relating, and other relational meditations coupled with →

Embodied awakening realizations of tools like psychedelics, rigorous meditation, tantric partner practices and eastern yogic techniques which is supported by →

The trauma healing capabilities of TRE, IFS, trauma-focused breathwork, and catharsis.

Where we're forced to step into our full evolutionary capacity as individuals - which includes healing wounds, embodying transcendence, radical responsibility and participation in the world.

And let's make this culture anti-fragile by expecting radical change and re-orientation to occur quite frequently.

A few cultural architecture dojos that I'm excited about are the Monastic Academy and Phoenix Culture.

Thanks for reading this far.

I find a ton of enjoyment in writing these newsletters, I hope you find just as much enjoyment in reading them.

I’m planning on releasing more premium pieces in the coming months. The creative spirit is flowing. Man, there is something about sitting down every day to create whether it feels right or not.

I’ll be releasing quite a bit of premium podcasts and newsletters coming up soon.

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Till next time. 👋

Peace out, from Guatemala. 🇬🇹