A conversation on Sunday morning, 2/9/2018

Jon Wiltshire
Sep 8, 2018 · 10 min read

I’ve tried to write a bullet point list from the heart based on a conversation with a friend this morning.

- There is a growing consciousness that goes beyond anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism. It guesses that rationality is a problem, that we need eternal human things like spiritual belief, unexplainable concepts like someone’s ‘energy’, ‘personal’ energy ‘boundaries’, and the ‘soul’. The point is we can’t explain what we mean by our own ‘energy’. But we believe in it nonetheless.

- It parallels what perhaps was happening in the build up to the 60s hippy and social movements, especially in America. It involves wholesale rejection of the new parts of our culture in the West (West could mean middle class kids in Beijing, but I’m not an expert). That rejection is usually coming from people who are not rooted in any old tradition of wisdom and who have often been bathed in Americana and its descendants — TV, movies, music, and the internet and the narcissism that social media drew out of us, something that previously was private. An influential friend’s assessment feels correct: it’s not so much that our culture is going in the wrong direction and that we can redirect it. It’s more that our culture is becoming cultureless. It’s a cliché, but that might mean it’s true: culture has been captured by other forces, namely greed, which seems rooted in fear (probably fear of death at an individual level).

- Masculinity is in crisis. This has been breathtakingly waded through by Robert Bly in his best-selling book Iron John, which blew my mind. I agree that this is a HUGE problem. I went into a night club recently, and my girlfriend said someone had scribbled ‘masculinity is dead’ on the wall. This is entirely the opposite direction of where we need to go. Why? Daoism — which, as a poetic stance towards life, I am inspired by — suggests that we look to the natural world in order to verify what we do and think. Which makes sense to me. We are part of it, we are animals (some people have a problem with this idea — but it’s not ‘reducing’ us to animals. If anything, it is elevating us to the plane where animals live in the wild). What is in nature? Abundance — of life, death, male and female. Also, tenderness and brutality. There is a huge amount of liberal orthodoxy right now about gender and gender fluidity. I’m not concerned with that argument — people being persecuted for living peacefully in their own way is something that should be challenged. I’m talking about the concepts of masculinity and femininity, and how, from nature, those ideas have developed across cultures. I don’t know much about this — I’m at the edge — and I am not at a University studying this stuff — but the point is that masculinity has been important across many cultures and traditions. And in our own, it seems to be receding. There is of course a reason for this — male dominance and the official and subtle subordinating of anyone else for hundreds of years. Something went wrong when the Judeo-Christian religions developed a (nearly) all-male cast: Jesus, God (He), Abraham, Mohammed, Moses, etc. Where are the women in these old stories? Rejecting masculinity in human society seems irresponsible, short-sighted, and, specifically, a reaction. Iron John makes these arguments excellently. The lack of masculine men, which is a problem, means that I and my friends don’t have too many masculine role models to guide us.

- Guidance, community, rituals and rites are what we are crying out for. What has seemed to me like hocus pocus and unnecessary ritual is, I think, exactly what we need more of. In Christianity, or in yoga, both of which are somehow close to the Western heart, we can see lots of rituals. But their symbolic meaning is lost. The story of Jesus seems so full of symbolism, weirdness, and ritual that it must have endured for a reason — what is the symbolic meaning of the wound in Jesus’s side on the cross? — but we are not ever taught to think symbolically because we grew up in an age of reason. Teenagers hanging around on the street are engaging in their own adolescent ritual, with symbolic rituals interwoven (dare-devilling etc.). But they have no guidance. Modernity — which we are all bathing in right now — diminishes the past and favours the future. This is a mistake. The basic argument that what has endured is worthy of that endurance seems lost in modern culture. That is, perhaps, until recently: the new consciousness is interested in ancient things (e.g. indigenous perspectives, how to be a custodian of the Earth). Before the Enlightenment — which gave birth to modernity (?) — Europe must have been awash with so many fake spiritualists, magicians, witches, shamans, etc., that the reaction was to burn them and go in the total opposite direction. The pendulum is — necessarily — now swinging back the other way. I am transitioning from being sort of pressganged into a life that wasn’t much mine towards trying to express what my ‘soul’ requires of me. Which a few years ago would have sounded crazy. But by following these more magical concepts and seeing things much more poetically, I have made more progress in a few years than in the preceeding lifetime. Some people may not want to celebrate the pendulum swinging the other way. But…

- The giant and existentially threatening environmental problem — THE problem of our time — which comprises climate change, pollution of all kinds, habitat and species destruction, lack of access to this diminishing environment for humans — is thick as thieves with capitalist consumerism. We’ve talked endlessly about how to fix it, but nothing has worked. Not the climate accords and deals, not alternatives to capitalism (which are simply not compatible with capitalism), not even new technology and renewables. The ancient thing that we rejected long ago is, it seems, the thing we need the most. What is this thing? We rejected it right about the time when the Enlightenment and then industrialization happened and we started getting into this mess (a mess that gave us amazing healthcare, science, but also obesity, advertising, pollution, and the concept of ‘waste’ itself). It’s hard to name it. But we can try… a good friend today reminded me of the Buddhist concept of a thousand hands pointing at the moon (which suggests that at some point after looking at everyone’s hands — BAM! — you see the full moon in all its glory!). The thing we left behind is a spiritual, mythical, mystical, unclear and non-rational stance towards life. This is what we so desperately need now. This argument is directly challenging the orthodoxy of modernism. But I am more and more convinced by the eternal lessons — hidden in stories and things we do so unconsciously that we don’t even see them (why do we blow out candles on a birthday cake?) — than by modern ones. To solve the environmental problem can take one second. Just like the idea that ‘war is over if you want it’. We just have to collectively will it. That might sound ridiculous, but that is what the new consciousness has to believe in. Because if we don’t believe it, it’s less likely to happen. John Lennon was right when he talked about war (although, importantly, fighting and killing each other seem to be eternal human behaviours, so I don’t believe that killing will end — but war on the scale of modernity and, in parallel, a war on the natural world on the scale of modernity can end). There are some irreversible environmental changes that are now underway. And they will hit in the coming decade, and harder in the following two or three. But we can limit that damage. If we really saw and loved the world in the myriad imaginary ways the great poets, writers, preachers, shamans saw and see it — we would not accept its destruction. Most days I feel in love with it, and that’s when I make good decisions for myself and my immediate environment. The opposite is also true some days.

- The deep inner world that more and more people are interested in — which has many consumerised false prophets (i.e. many yoga teachers I have met, doing a huge disservice to the various yoga traditions and innovations) — is directly if vaguely (I haven’t figured out how to talk about it well) related to our collective destruction of other living beings (this is not an aside promoting veganism). Our culturelessness has ballooned just as the forests have shrunk. There has to be a link.

- The most important education — which is exactly NOT what children are told as soon as they can understand a language — is an education that encourages us to cultivate a sense of who we are. You can do this by cultivating a sense of what you like, what excites you, what you are drawn to, etc. And then step two is actually following exactly what you want. This sounds dangerous to the Western policymaker, who has an impulse to control (freedom has to have a healthy disregard for lots of rules). Our system relies on half-slaves (not to diminish the unendurable suffering endured by the world’s actual slaves, past and present) who do what they are told. This is not because of a conspiracy. It’s happening because systems have logics, and this is ours. So people ‘doing what they want’ sounds like a bad idea — because the system will collapse. This system is already collapsing even if we are slaves to it, so better to try our own unique path and perhaps make the crash landing a little softer. Deep down, most wisdom traditions emphasise that what we want and acting on that is how to truly live. It might not all be pretty, it might not lead to blissed-out really polite people, but that is the point. Humanity is expressed best by a pantheon, or by many characters. Not by any one way or one doctrine of being perfect, or being really full of sin for the sake of others, or whatever else single-minded doctrines say. The Judeo-Christian religions were of course reacting to what came before, and we have to now untie some of their knots. We think that Buddhism and yoga, as understood in the cities I’ve been to and lived in in Europe, is all about emptiness and through emptiness, bliss and politeness and vegetarianism. I used to think that Buddhist and yogic ideas were all right, and then I thought they were all wrong — are all the humans who do human things bad or unholy? But now I think that Buddhist and yogic thought have just been misunderstood (by me) and mistranslated and mistaught. I can’t read Sanskrit, so who knows… the main point is that ‘know thyself’ and act accordingly is the hardest thing to get to grips with because it is indescribable beyond these fairly empty words. But it’s the central thing that most of us in the modern world are NOT doing. And it’s the central thing that rings so true deep inside of me that I felt moved to write this essay. It doesn’t mean having alternative clothes. It means really digging deep and being in a dialogue with something inside (again, indescribable) and then following that in the real, hard, physical world, and gaining insight and material changes over days and years. That is what we are not doing in the West, or at least what I didn’t do and what I see many people around me not doing. We are very much unmerrily humming along to a tune recorded years or hundreds of years ago, generation after generation, without realizing that all the answers are inside us. Kafka — David Foster Wallace highlights — said it best when he described years of banging on the door and crying to be let in, only for it to suddenly open up and you suddenly realise that you were inside the sacred chamber — your unique sacred chamber — all along. If so few people are doing this, I want to outlandishly wager that if we all did this to the best of our ability — be ourselves — we can actually turn the lead of Western non-culture to gold. But it’s really hard for the new generation, which I might, at a push, still be part of. We don’t have free education, cheap rent, cheap housing, lots of time to play with in terms of environmental collapse. This generation is looking for answers to spiritual as well as practical questions — why is everything so expensive? Why am I so miserable? Why do I feel so powerless? As well as, who am I and what am I on Earth for? We don’t have any heros to tell us, really, so we have to become some, find some… or make it up. Making it up can be dangerous — the Nazis utilized versions of German and European mythology and folklore to garner support. But it could, alternatively, be beautiful. A similar lurch to the right is happening again in Europe. Most people’s concerns are about what I’m writing about, but expressed in a fascistic, fear-driven way.

- We need elders. I have come into contact with my own mentor — who I found without consciously looking. I think it was an inherent need and it happened without me rationalizing it. This interaction — face to face with another human who is older and is from a similar cultural background and has similar interests (this can be anything — nature, punk, pizza ovens) — has embedded in me more guidance — practical stuff as well as esoteric — than years of looking for answers in a library, newspaper, yoga studio, university or workplace. We can only find the real gold through real life — interaction with other humans, ideally responsible elders, who have traditions that we can believe in and want to engage in. Time in nature can also be time with a sort of proto-elder. But we really need other humans.

The idea of looking to tradition is antithetical to modernity. But it’s an idea that comes up again and again in times of crisis. That in itself is eternal. Look we must. A big group of disparate people in the West are doing so in parallel right now; because we are all lost.

This bullet point essay has been inspired by the friend I had a conversation with this morning, and by lots of other people and conversations: my mentor; Robert Bly’s Iron John; Michael Meade’s podcast; ‘Living Myth’; the Tao te Ching; spending more time in nature; spending lots of time in the city; other friends; several other secret experiences.

Jon Wiltshire

Written by

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade