ON SPIRITUALITY AND EXISTENTIALISM
RUNG ONE —Mystery
How did it start? Was there some calling, or a plethora of inexplicable awes and confusions, when you were a child? Was it seen? Heard? Was there a something that is no longer remembered? Were you too afraid, or was the experience so profound, you told no one. Because you didn’t understand, so maybe were scared. Not of the it, but of what could happen to you if you told?
RUNG TWO —Religion
You create a form of prayer. Something apart. Seemingly both holy and special. But it is nameless because it has been smothered by religion, the only mirror in a concrete world. So you do what is both rebellious and same. Someone has invented a new one. I know about that. Did you know I know about that? Of course. Because I, also, have been there.
RUNG THREE—Specialisation
So you hunt stories that fit. You transfer worship from a word called god to a word called goddess. Sometimes you put the two in the same sentence, thinking that’s fair. Can’t be biased. What do women think? That we have left rung two for rung three? No. Divisionism is created.
RUNG FOUR—Importance
Now come the predictable accoutrements. You have heard of robes and candles and incense so you create patterns that set you even further apart from others. This often causes deeper rifts. Within families — apathetically, inconsequentially or emphatically — enmeshed in the behaviour of rung two. They don’t want you to do this journey down. It is radical. It is sinful. They are afraid for you. Of you. You offend them. They have been advised about what happens to bad people when their flesh dies, and they are terrified for you. For a soul. A word without meaning. Terror can go one of two ways, aggression or retreat, and you stand your ground because, you are certain, you are on rung four and they are back there on rung two. To your mind, kudos.
RUNG FIVE—Holiness
So now you have it set. You do all the appropriate things for one who is stepping deeper into the labyrinth. You have your robes, your incense, your candles, a recipe, also, by other radicals (you think) who carved this territory. You raise your arms to the full moon and you invent and agree to a gender. You gender earth. You who are woman, supressed, shut up, shut down, forced to breed, have your teeth knocked out and your body used to satisfy, while wondering should I also feel something other than this expansion and contraction of a vagina around whatever? You seek to experience rung one, but, you think, on my own terms. Do others resent you for it? Of course. This is what rung five is all about. Being appropriate. Men are left to compromise. Get batshit angry at exclusion. Continue to aggress earth. To be excluded, or revered for serving those who desire war or whose maiming fascinates the self-righteous.
Is any of it right? Who defines right or wrong? Are the two not constructs, flaunting galaxies as less significant than an opinion?
RUNG SIX—Theft
You raise in the invented hierarchical rank to claim some title that, despite the warning, silently remains the confusion of rung two that, in some, artistic but artificial way, induces a feeling of both euphoria and altitude. You are climbing down, down deep but you convince yourself (maybe others) that this is ascension. You are better than anybody else. Not free, mind you, just more important. You name stuff. You claim credentials as high priest or high priestess. Of something. You now possess an authoritative opinion as to what that is. I know, I’ve been here. I believed it also.
So somewhere you learned of initiation. That’s akin to when a relationship is told by someone, somewhere, to go to the next level. You add that to the mix. Initiation at the hands of another human representing whatever you have been enticed by that has the most danger, but no consequence.
Because there is an illusion of danger (like being initiated at the point of a sword and threatened and devoting yourself to some invented deity, oaths you ought not betray, secrecy akin to the food of faerie) but without recognisable consequences, you eventually think what or who, in a so-called past that is both mysterious and other than white bread and margarine, can I use as a mirror?
Oh, that would be Egypt, or the jungles of the Amazon, or the inhabitants of the lands and species all but conquered, and ravaged, that either face extinction or have ceased, altogether, being what they once bred as. We will raise them up in our image. Or, at least, what we romance — seduce — ourselves into thinking were/are/represent.
You want to be them. You take what you want. Or think you do. Dust really.
So you take up the colours of Africa, Turtle Island, Gondwana, India, Persia, the South Pacific, or those buried in endless sand and tundra, but that archaeologists dug up, and mutilated, calling the corpses and grave goods discoveries. For display and academic recognition, even while secretly knowing someone who came before them actually put them there intentionally. A bit like saying fuck you, I don’t care.
The mummies are all royalty, you are told, or were in some way wiser than you are now, so you must learn the surface of the Rosetta Stone and mimic what you guess. Who, you conclude, after hundreds of years of specific religious indoctrination, they were.
RUNG SEVEN—Ritual (repetition)
Then you’re stuck with it. For what? Six months? Six years? A lifetime? For however long another human agrees to what you are pretending. Your specialness. And even while doing so you attend the gatherings of those on rung two because you really haven’t moved from there and deep within the secret rooms of your consciousness you know that. And you also fear the ramifications — and rightly so — of being cast out. After the xmas lunch you go wherever home is and sigh. Then you get on the phone, or visit other seekers that look and think like you and sigh even louder. You must cling to, and gather with, others who believe as you have learned to do. If you don’t the darkness, below what hints at being some final rung, is what? Bottomless?
You cling to rung six. The candles, the incense, the accoutrements. But you add stuff. Stuff you have stolen from others. People with a culture you neither have, nor are. You learn to make the dream catcher, to beat the drum while singing with the invader’s tongue, explaining in the invader’s accustomed narrative. To speak of Earth Mother and Sky Father, as though this is your real language. Very often suggested by a half naked and nubile warrior-looking cartooned girl/woman with extreme breasts and a leopard by her side that is obviously present as a companion, or else a bearded warrior man, with leaves weaving in and out of his face and mouth and a sword, or an AK47 in his hands. The people throwing rocks at tanks not part of this.
Yet.
Do you secretly know you do not honour those from whom you steal but mimic? Still stealing? A culture not your own. Bitter, within the shadows, that you have not been claimed by them despite how you lie? But you did it first. You made it known beyond the privacy of your four walls or the asylum outpatient clinic. So others will follow. There was a movie called Field of Dreams, oh, in the deeply historic past of 1989 and don’t even know that if you build it they will come is the screenplay version of Canadian novelist W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 book, just as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was the inspiration for the current group titling themselves Church of All Worlds (for the tax perks). Please read that group’s title again so we are certain we are on the same page re this rung. Certainly, nothing comes from nothing but, then, where is your research?
RUNG EIGHT—Convincement
You realise you can make a buck from all this gathering of reasons for existence. So you experiment with different products to make incense. You get good at making crowns to sell because aren’t there queens and kings in all this? Significant things. Stuff beyond Marvel, ergo it must be real? You get a gleaning that your own DNA thread may have something of significance to it so you might read the writers, like Margaret Mead or Joseph Campbell or even Carl Jung, and patchwork together an even more complex self. You dress in clothing that you think reflects what indigenous people wear; their shamans. Some allude-to ancestors. Or some ascended masters business model. You have to get fancy though because your history has been blancmange for centuries. Made beige under the weights of the persecutions of those calling themselves holy. Being beige and goodly is a. what you hate, and b. unforgivable. You can’t possibly be descended from slave owners or murderers-in-perpetuity. Can you? Or worse, peasants and factory workers. But from the depths of the labyrinth comes the breath, barely above a whisper: oh yes you can, oh yes you are. So you keep an even more delusional distance from rung two and get loud. Defending rights. Anyone’s rights. Anyone you consider also repressed, because aren’t you? Weren’t you? At two or three or four or five. When you opened that first gift under the tree, or searched for that first chocolate egg that was supposedly from a bunny, that you have told yourself is really a goddess of spring, condescendingly because by now you are sure you know it all.
Then your mother dies. Your best friend is gang-raped. Your home is razed to the ground or you lose your job and you wonder where a next meal is coming from. Or you tried that drug and phew, doesn’t that take the pressure to perform down a notch? Or the ritual wine becomes wine-o-clock and one more can’t hurt, and besides, you were offered that by the priest or the representative of this god everyone talks about and despite how they violated you, the wine was good. But let’s not remember that, unless someone speaks out first, and then it’s okay to rage.
And you wonder where all your chutzpah has gone, but you don’t show it. Somewhere, someone said if you show you’ve been harmed you might not be the all-powerful representative of some deity named for a landmass or a season (that’s conveniently forgotten or else never learned). You wake sweating, knowing none of it is real. You look the question in the eye for a mere second. You ask what’s real because everything you knew on rung one has tattered in the broken bodies, bloated on white flour, their lungs collapsing from mine dust or asbestos. Their brains turning to mush from the lollies still at the counter of the newsagency. In that split second you are afraid. In that split second you acknowledge, silently, that it is all pretence because death is real but if the crown is gold-looking enough, it could actually be gold but after another fashion. Maybe.
RUNG NINE—Existential
There you are, a long way into the abyss, checking the safety of this rung, as it is potentially the most dangerous of them all. You could fall here. Get angry. Get bitter. Make division your weapon against being nobody special, after all. You see your grandmother buried and, although she was a poet and an activist against the poaching of elephants or in defence of the whale or the endangered penguin, she got old, became incontinent, got put in a home and conveniently dies, her legacy forgotten, her will empty of useful things like money. And the people from rung two still hold all the aces because she is put in a box. There is a nice xian service. The box seems to burn in some 2000 degree Fahrenheit fire intended to erase her completely, or else she is put in the ground with a plethora of other corpses, all in neat rows until a housing development is approved, and stone (in some deep parody of ancient memory) erected that says when she was born and when she was dead, and who loved her, as though she hadn’t also lived for a trillion years in some form or another until she became what we recognise as an individual of a particular species. In difference to every other species, that we cannot consider, because if we thought we were as impermanent as them we could not destroy them as we choose for the newest iPhone or Adidas trainers. No. We take the position as vegetarian. We add that to the list of holy things and we do not ask what vast forests were destroyed for the almonds or the soy.
But the rats are now free of the laboratory cages and the seed of pointlessness sprouts on the kitchen windowsill.
Is any of it real? Has anyone got the truth? Are their aliens among us? Are you descended from angels? Is the awakening 888 when once it was 777 and before that, it was Crowley’s 666. No. Between them is/has been 11:11 therefore you are important and your god is sending you messages so just keep up with the trend.
But then even that popular phenomenon gets old. Cotton now killing water. The proponents of that yesterday-trend shuffling like crazy and oops, fuck me, you better garment yourself in the title of elder and make that the significance because otherwise… well, we know what happened to grandmother. But you still need the wine. You still need to be a radical pot smoker but now you call it cannabis to be on trend. And act all smug despite what happened to all those kids who smoked your hydro too young and felt the need to kill their bodies at twenty three.
And you get fat. You are allowed. All the other pagans are fat, aren’t they? You go to pagans in the pub and eat a meal and wonder what to talk about and hope you are seen, are recognised as belonging, got the outfit right, know the true way. But then the diabetes kicks in and the hips become sore and you have to hide all that because you’re supposed to remain forever-young.
And alone at night. Or with a wife/husband that you love, don’t you? Despite not really being yourself around them because they, too, could leave, even if it means living on the street in a tent. You think, I could do that, don’t think I couldn’t except you haven’t, so far, except on that camping weekend.
RUNG TEN—Don’t Look Down
Now, here you are. At a severe and very real crossroads. You’re back is to the wall in your secret place. Your adamancy for self-expression and being appreciated now for show because how else to remain significant? And you look down. Your foot feels for the reassurance of yet another rung but there isn’t one. It’s all fall from now on.
You have two choices: one is to cling to the significance of every rung, just a bit of each, and hang there until you are a cadaver on the slab in a morgue, being filled with formaldehyde, after lying in the stark hopelessness of a hospital bed still believing in meaning but knowing that, with depths comes an erasure of self because no one can tell you what happens in the blackness of that potentially endless fall.
Or you can let go. And find out.
When does this happen? Is this death? You can be twelve or ninety eight (random ages). Still wondering what death is. Being deluded into believing it won’t happen if… if….
The thing is, no one has come back from the real thing to explain eternity. Having your bits seeming to stop for seconds, maybe minutes, until the defibrillator shocks your heart, is not an experience of death but a pause in life. Anything you have to say does not explain the abyss because you’re not still flying.
RUNG ELEVEN—The Calling
Did I know rung ten? Yes, and no. Have I died? Very young, yes. Then several more semi-deaths and deaths that didn’t remain. Was I resuscitated? Obviously. Was I called? Yep. At rung two. The question has always been obfuscated by every other rung I climbed down to this point. By what?
By what was I called?
By what were you called? Or were you? Or was being a brat to your sister or your mother or your father the entire reason for challenging rung one?
Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in the year (on the Gregorian calendar) of 2016. Did you grow up with his poetry? Did you hear the lyrics and fear? Did you experience a visceral reaction when you first heard Desolation Row? Do you understand his prophesies, in retrospect? Because you’re there now. Even if you have a top floor apartment, with subtle lighting and Uber meals delivered at your beckoning, overlooking the bay. With the dog. The question becomes the only light bright enough to see by. Because this is better, I have the ketamine. I can get away with snorting a little more cocaine.
What happens when you let yourself realise that in the hugeness of an observable, named-by-some-fucker universe, you are nothing? When all that remains of all this seeking for meaning, that became something else, something tainted, something caged, is the question what was it for?
RUNG TWELVE—Seeking Rung Thirteen
When you first began this journey down the bone ladder you were so full of hope. So nourished by delusion. So adamant. So certain of your rightness. That you had meaning. That you could heal or make, or speak or decorate or sing or drum or play the harp or the uilleann pipes or, or, or.
You know you are nothing.
Except…
One might ask oneself is there a difference between falling and flying? The outcome is generally the same. From the observation of what is known as gravity, anyway. That’s the problem with observation. It is not realised from the point of view of the observed. Usually. At least not the object that didn’t walk away. Observation is not experiential. Observation is the perception of an experience. Is it often repeated? Well, that’s the difference between falling and flying, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
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