All Gods, No Masters: A Guide

Tips for navigating this publication

Welcome to my blog page :)

After years of faithfully updating this publication with all manner of tangentially-relevant stories, I’ve decided it’s time to retire All Gods, No Masters. I began this publication to create a home for my thoughts on anarchism and spirituality (and anarchist spirituality, and spiritual anarchism), and I’m reaching a point where I think I might have said all I have to say on that subject.

It’s not that I believe in these ideas any less, I’m just running out of things to say about them. My interests are shifting in more targeted directions, and I think, as the kids might say, I’m not in my AGNM era anymore.

In honor of its retirement, I’m writing this as a guide to the publication to help anyone who comes across it sift through its contents. So, without further ado…

What is “All Gods, No Masters”?

It’s a blog about anarchism and spirituality, and specifically, where and why the two intersect. The title is a play on the anarchist slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” poking fun at the belief that anarchism is incompatible with spiritual or religious faith.

The TL;DR of this publication:

I believe that anarchism is not only compatible with spirituality, but is an essential manifestation of spiritual truth. The belief in a divine higher power, conceptualized as anything from the Abrahamic God to the sacredness of nature, both promises and demands non-hierarchical human society. If you have any mystical perspective at all, its only logical political manifestations are direct democracy, cooperative ownership, free association, distribution based on ability and need, and living honorably and harmoniously in the more-than-human world.

A guide to the essays

For ~easy reading~

Introductions/Overviews

If you’re encountering this publication for the first time, there are two essays I’d start with:

1. What is God, to an Anarchist?
2. Why God is an Anarcho-Communist

These two probably serve as the best introduction to the ideas on this blog. The former looks at God* through an anarchist lens, explaining how my anarchism informs my faith and spiritual beliefs. The latter looks at anarchism through a spiritual lens, explaining how faith informs my political and social beliefs.

*Substitute any other word for the divine here that you prefer.

My Top 5 Reads from this publication

The 5 essays I (personally) think are the most important to read.

1. How to Stand While the World Falls Down
2. The Power of Here
3. Help! I’m Living in a Trauma Response
4. Should I Become Enlightened or Maybe Just Go Outside?
5. Your Needs Are Only Ever States of Being

Essays by topic

Going deeper on anarchist spirituality/spiritual anarchism

1. How to Stand While the World Falls Down
2. Anarchism as a Spiritual Practice
3. Anarcho Te Ching
4. My Secular Religion
5. The Anarchist in Church

Essays on this strange era we live in

1. Why I Trust the Future
2. What the Fuck is Going On
3. What the Fuck to Do Next
4. Thoughts on This Election Day (2020)
5. Welcome to Late-Stage Liberalism
6. On Looking for God in the Age of Extinction

Essays on trauma and healing

1. Help! I’m Living in a Trauma Response
2. Unraveling the World of War
3. We Need to Get Serious About Our Collective Trauma
4. It’s Time to End The False “Self Help vs. Social Change” Debate
5. I, Angry Animal in a Made-up World
6. You’re Not Crazy. It’s Really Not Supposed to Be Like This.

Essays on ecology and nature

1. Should I Become Enlightened or Maybe Just Go Outside?
2. The Attachment Trauma We Don’t Talk About
3. Let’s Settle the “Altruistic” vs. “Selfish” Human Nature Debate
4. The Thrill of Homecoming

Essays on systems

1. The Key Ingredient of a Healthy Society
2. The Economy Is the Root of Our Problems (but Not in the Way You Might Think)
3. America Needs a New Morality
4. The Problem with Government and the Truth About Care

Essays on strategies

1. The Tao of Degrowth
2. The Yoga of Dual Power
3. Effortless Order
4. Activism as Yoga
5. Why Personal Lifestyle Changes Still Matter to Fight Climate Chaos
6. Yes, Spiritual Oneness Is Compatible with Identity Politics
7. The Spiritual Case for Police Abolition

Essays on empowerment and power

1. Do We Create Our Own Reality, or Just Influence It?
2. To #Manifest a New World from the Ashes of the Old?
3. Waging Wellness
4. The Power of Here

Essays on spiritual philosophy

1. In Search of a Spiritual Theory-of-Everything
2. On the Power of Recognizing I Don’t Exist
3. If You Haven’t Had a Spiritual Experience, Don’t Try to “Debunk” Spirituality
4. What “Illusion Is the Cause of Suffering” Means

Essays offering concrete spiritual advice

1. Your Needs Are Only Ever States of Being
2. How to Make Your Relationships Authentically Harmonious
3. How (and Why) to Change Your Beliefs
4. The Cheat Code to Trauma Cycles
5. How to Trick the Ego into Dissolving Itself
6. Source Does Not Speak in Form
7. Understanding Your Life’s Purpose
8. How a Petty Fight About Tinder Taught Me the Most Important Spiritual Lesson of My Life

Last…

If you don’t want to pay for a Medium account, most of these essays are also available on my website: www.allgodsnomasters.com.

P.S. If you’re wondering why the links all say “dogs-with-buddha-nature,” that was the original name of the blog, and Medium won’t let me change the link.

P.P.S. It’s not that I’m going to stop putting out any content on these topics, just that I think I’ve exhausted this blog and this format of discussing them. Keep your eyes peeled for other kinds of content remixing and weaving together many of these essays.