On Free and Natural Adulthood
The Future is Responsible (and Very, Very Fun)
I can use my conscious anger to make things happen, and fast. But I will not do it to save others. Or to escape my own victimhood. I don’t need rescuing, and neither does anyone else. I do it because I want these things to happen. Can I explain why? Sometimes, yes: for beauty, for love, for connection and intimacy and for the sheer joy of it. Sometimes, no: there is no reason, at least none that can be expressed in words, for what I want to do. I just do it. I just create. Does the painter need to explain why he “put that bit there, in that direction, in that exact shade”? No. That would murder the poetry and mystery and naturalness of the painting.
The paint just paints.
The adult just lives.
I am beginning to refuse to undertake the child’s task of endlessly explaining and justifying my life and my actions. I could spend my whole life rationalising my few genuinely original, authentic and creative actions to authority figures. This is almost completely unnecessary: most of authorities I’m talking to in my head either do not care, are not listening, or are from my past, utterly irrelevant to what is happening NOW.
The added horror of this scenario is that not one of those reasons or explanations (for why I do what I do) would be genuine or authentic. They are all adaptive (feeding my survival strategy). They are all bullshit. Because they are not coming from me — and they are not for me, either! Taken together, these bullshit reasons for my bullshit actions form the unconscious and mechanical character-role that was offered to me as a child, and that I eagerly took up in order not to ruffle anyone’s feathers. It is the clockwork, tirelessly-rehearsed script, of the “good boy/son/pupil/citizen” who ensures that all of their actual creative originality is swiftly and effectively masked from view, lest the onlooking public sound the alarm and shout “HEY, LOOK! THIS PERSON ACTUALLY BELIEVES THEMSELVES TO BE A CREATOR. WHAT AN EGOMANIAC! STOP HIM!!!!”
A genuinely creative person is extremely dangerous to a civilisation that is built upon the lived-belief that we are not the creators, but the victims of life. The religion, indeed the very metaphysics, of the West rests on the assumption that we are the victims of an external creator. Or, in the more recent case of Scientific Materialism, the victims of a cold, dead meaningless cosmos.
Any challengers to these views have been systematically rooted out, hunted down and disposed of as insane, megalomaniacal or malevolent. Anyone who rises to the task of consciously creating disturbs — and evolves — the entire global matrix of unconsciousness, in which billions of people act out their unconscious Low Dramas, day after day, month after months, year after year, without ever admitting to themselves their total responsibility as creators of themselves, the world and indeed the entire fucking cosmos!
If everyone is creating, and everyone is responsible, then the question becomes: are you conscious of this fact, or not?
Irresponsibility is an illusion. And so is uncreativity.
So: are you taking responsibility for what you create, every single moment of your life?
Because if we are the creators of this reality, radically responsible for all of it, then the sheer horror of the mess that we have created, the filth we are writing in here on planet earth, is inescapable. Child abuse, slavery, rape, war, genocide, ecocide, racism, sexism, corporate exploitation and the rampant suppression of human community, culture, conviviality and creativity…
Are you ready to take responsibility for this? All of it? Even that bit — the one that makes your blood curdle and deep ancestral fear to creep up your spine?
Or do you choose to keep your head in the sand — playing victim, blaming others, waiting for a rescuer — and hiding from your authorship of reality’s play?
Do you pray and wait for God to come — or do you recognise your fundamental participation in EVERYTHING, and start acting in a way that supports further evolution, harmonisation and healing?
This is a recognition that God / the Divine / the Archetypal is always working and living not only through you but as you, as well. You can choose to be a conscious of this, or not. It doesn’t matter. You are still responsible. You are still a fundamental creator of reality. (And being a creator, one of infinite number of souls, is what gets you down from any false pedestal of believing yourself to be “THE” Creator. I mean, you are The Creator — but so is everyone else).
The key point is this: when you do choose to be conscious of your radical responsibility for everything in the world, it HURTS and you inevitably DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
“Consciousness is responsibility in action.” said Mr. Clinton Callahan. And it’s only by admitting and owning our part in creating unspeakable ugliness, that we regain access to our ability to create unspeakable beauty.
You cannot incarnate as an embodied human being without supporting the entire living cosmos which supports you. Indigenous cultures not only know this but devote their entire lives to upholding this reciprocity. Giving and receiving, giving and receiving — forever and ever! Endless and eternal cycles of life-giving generosity!
If you opt out of this co-dependence (or “mutual indebtedness” as Martin Prechtel calls it) or simply pretend that it isn’t the case, then you lose the support of the cosmos, just as She loses your support as a divine source of creation and novelty — the necessary fuel for ongoing cosmic maintenance and evolution.
Gaia cannot regenerate without you, friend.
SHE NEEDS YOU. I NEED YOU. WE ALL DO.
Are you ready to feel the soul-rending grief of what we have done, and continue to do with fierce and unrelenting momentum, to ourselves, to one another, to our precious living planet? To our bodies, our minds, our dreams, our beings?
We hide our beings for fear of rejection, persecution, even death: for to exit the Low Drama Underworld of Civilisation (Modern Culture) and to enter the High Drama of Archetypally-Initiated, Fundamentally Creative and Radically-Responsible Adulthood (Next Culture) is to make oneself highly visible, vulnerable and open to feedback. Historically, those who did this were thrown into asylums, exiled to distant islands, or burned at the stake. This is unconscious feedback: it starts with destructive attack fuelled by blame against a perpetrator for doing wrong (challenging everyone’s survival strategies by proposing that we not only survive, but live and evolve). It can also start with praise of a rescuer by the victims who wanted to be rescued (from a persecutor), so as to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. And around and around it goes, on and on: endless cycles of Low Drama.
Conscious feedback is different. It is, in fact, essential for evolutionary progress. Without conscious and constructive feedback, there is no knowing whether to correct and update your course, or in which direction. Conscious feedback simply tells you STOP! or YES!…. BEEP! or GO! This works, this doesn’t work. Update and improve your approach, or continue doing more of what works. Simple.
Feedback is the life-giving sap of a radically responsible culture: it is how we inform one another of the consequences of our actions, allowing us to become ever-more conscious of the effects of our continual creating (that is, our being alive), allowing us to assume ever-greater responsibility for all that is.
The adult never blames another for harmful or destructive actions because the adult assumes responsibility for all such actions. The walls of separation between us are known to be totally imaginary, mere concepts.
Responsible for all others, there are no “others”, not really. Just so, there is no separate and isolated “me”. The adult thus operates in the Expansive, Creative and Ultimately Indefinable Context of the Non-duality of the Unity and Multiplicity of all Beings.
We are one and many, and both, and neither. And, none of these stances is ultimately true: each is a story that I/you/we are free to pick up, entertain, live by, and discard as we please. We are Nothing and Everything — and both, and totally beyond any of these limited and limiting concepts.
(Hint: it’s because our concepts generate our perceptions, that the stories we choose generate our reality. In the Beginning was the Word. Logos. Different concept, different reality. Word. As Americans say.)
The adult rests in the knowing that all other adults are fully respectful of one another’s radical responsibility, and can never be a victim of another’s actions. To play victim to another’s actions amounts to saying “I am not responsible for this action”, which an adult will never do. This bullshit-story would be an effective way to avoid feeling the sadness of the situation: sadness that part of me, which I may or may not call “another person” is acting destructively. Consciously feeling this sadness is an act of High Drama which connects the adult to the sadness of lost potentials, to beauties destroyed or unrealised, to intimacies un-pursued, to deeper recognition of our fundamentally co-dependent communion and the ever-accessible archetypal heartbreak of living, breathing and dying together.
Do you see how it goes?
How conscious feelings are the lifeblood of a radically responsible cosmic organism?
How conscious thoughts are the memetic DNA of a global cultural intelligence?
How conscious energetics form the communications-web of the entire Gaian Life Matrix?
How conscious archetypal relationships are our interface and exchange with an infinite Beyond?
Everything you do is felt and sensed by every other living being, either directly or indirectly. A human heart viscerally senses a rainforest being destroyed. A hummingbird senses the migration of the reindeer, thousands of miles to the North.“The entire earth lived as every villager” wrote Prechtel of his Mayan hometown on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.
Just so, we are each constantly feeling and sensing the actions of innumerable other living beings throughout infinite time and space. We can choose to be conscious of these feelings, or not.
Feeling and sensing one another as an inseparable whole, the entire cosmos evolves as one divinely intelligent and creative organism, one unified light of consciousness refracted and replicated into countless individual intelligences that we might call “souls” or “beings”, in order to more precisely focus the laser of awareness towards carving and crafting the diamond-void-luminosity into ever-more sublime, complex and beautiful evolutionary patterns!
The entire infinite future unfolds according to your choices, your actions, every single moment.
You are creating this, are you not? Are you ready to admit to yourself that this, right now, is precisely what you have chosen? That this is what you wanted all along? To accept that your mind is the mind of God, and thereby to reclaim your creation-sourcing centre from that distant and abstracted Other? If you can accept this, then you can proceed to co-create with that Other — indeed with an infinite community of Others — as radically responsible sources (or sorcerers) of all that is.
Admitting to yourself that you created all of this, in collaboration with countless billions of other radically responsible creator-beings: this is the dawn of adulthood.
This is the dawn of realising, recognising and respecting yourself as an essential, primordial, and eternal creator of reality. Way, way, WAY more than human. And yet, for now, so blissfully and rapturously engaged in being human, that you can drop thinking about all of this and JUST LIVE!
Free and natural, baby. Ain’t it delicious?
This is HIGH-LEVEL FUN. And it makes me want to say: THANK YOU!
Thank you for being a vital participant in the Great Play: the Divine Theatre of Souls who are currently enacting “Gaia, Kosmos, and the Human Clowns — Act One Scene Two”, in an unprecedentedly wild and ambitious improvisational experiment of planetary proportions, seeking no other than the spontaneous harmonisation of billions of living beings into one intentionally-aligned and psychically-unified creative organism, each individual body forming the vibrating cells of a spit-laden planetary mouthpiece pouring forth the long-imprisoned-yet-instantaneously-improvised saxophone solos of ancient and ancestral lament, wailing grief and praise of countless generations before us and countless to come, and the unspeakable poignancy of our plunge into the total unknown, our shared journey to make enduring beauty in an eternally appearing yet and continuously vanishing world…
Did Coltrane need explain himself? Did Did Jesus? Did Patti Smith? Leonard Cohen? No. And neither do I, and neither do you. I take my centre back from authority figures: I decide what I do, and when, and why. It is a terrifying place to live, with nobody, not even a whisper of an outside voice, telling you what you “should do” in this moment. There is simply me, you, and the void of nothingness: the void of total possibility, the ever-pregnant womb of infinite creation.
Speak, and it shall be so.
Sing, and she shall appear.
