Exile / Snake-Dance Remix : Training for Clarity
In nature, the poison and its antidote are always in very close proximity to each other.
In certain clans and tribes of the Americas, a high-level rite of passage for a healer was what was called a Snake Dance Ceremony. At the heart of the experience was a supreme test; a highly poisonous snake would bite the practitioner. From then on, either the practitioner would transmute the poison or succumb.
The powerful, alarming part of the experience was that death in fact was not a possibility. Failure did not result in death. Worse, the practitioner would embody a certain kind of insanity; the heaviest kind of insanity in fact. All memory of the ceremony would disappear, and the practitioner would continue on into life with no knowledge of what had happened.
The essence of the challenge is this: the practitioner finds himself in exile, with no knowledge of having arrived and only some deeper sensing that this place where the signs and symbols suddenly do not make much sense is now his home. His reality.
In finding a narrative structure to best understand where we stand today as individuals and as participants in this great experiment called civilization, exile is most powerful. Exile as a narrative and framework that leads to clear understanding is superior to either the progressive narrative or the conservative — both of which confuse people into believing they recognize what is happening today.
And the quicker we embrace this truth the better off we will be. Why? Because to be in exile and not know it creates the deepest and most absolute kind of disorientation in a person. Drawn by the very human need to feel some sense of security in the world, we will find explanations for things that don’t stack up — no different than the way early explorers forced unknown realities and cultures into their own small frameworks. To the great and lasting detriment of both.
There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. -Wendell Berry
This is key: Turn confusion, uncertainty and anxiety into forces of high-functioning capability. Train the mind with discipline to master uncertainty as opposed to solving for it. The rest will fall into place.
But first, one must take the poison in a remarkably honest way by starting from the truth that what was once held as certain is gone.
All certainty has to be jettisoned. This act of courage and simple pragmatism is the only way to survive — and eventually master — the current state of exile we all find ourselves in. To fail is to remain as we are, invisibly enslaved to a compelling array of consoling illusions that bring the worst kind of comfort and conformity.
If we want to create and give form to the future there is no other way in.
Andrew Markell is the Co-Founder of Exile, a company that creates, advises and helps capitalize transformative companies and market ecosystems dedicated to empowering people + planet.
