Metavalent Stigmergy

Hey there, dying daily dear ones.

Today's character alignment / mood / tenor seems to be "optimistic morbid," as in, "yeah, the whole world has completely come undone, it's game over, there's no going back to normal because normal was always a delusion, and so yay, it's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine."
Which is a good place from which to share a few notes on current update regarding evolution of our work, a very, very thin slice of which somehow finds expression in this space.

This awareness leads me to realize that I've perhaps accidentally allowed a vile perception to arise that this site is our work. It is, but it's also very much not. Everything you see, hear, or read here is, of course, one obviously tangible facet of our work; but it is not anywhere close to being the work itself. The work itself, cultivating and manifesting A World That Works for Everyone, takes countless shapes and forms, and for you to even begin to understand what it is that I do for a living, you'd have to be with me 24 hours a day, living out of a backpack, or maybe with access to a car or some kind of traditional shelter, if conditions require those things. What you always counted as work, and what you didn't count as work, are not the same as the work we are talking about, here. Those old-world conceptions and definitions no longer serve us or the world, and one of the major responsibilities for us in the present moment is to continue building bridges and connections from the world that doesn't work to the world that does work, for everyone. While that may sound nebulous, grandiose, or simply impossible to some; in reality, when you really get down to brass tacks, it's more like parenting: literally the most important work on the planet, and yet we've been living in a horrendous world that treats parenting like it's nothing. It's like caregiving. Given lip service as the most valuable work we can possible do, and yet compensated by pathetic minimum wages that don't even come close to supporting caregivers. Combined with a misplaced sense of elder-worship, we cultivate a world in which $7/hr employees endure being bitten, kicked, hair-pulled, punched, and worse, by elders who we dare not diagnose with behavioral problems because, well, they are venerated elders.

If all this sound a bit heretical, good. It's meant to be. It's meant to question the assumptions that have been dictated to us, particularly those dictates that do not at all square with our own direct experience. Isn't that what zen is supposed to be about? Test it against your own direct experience? On the other end of the elder care spectrum, we have predator systems and formal or informal gangs of flying monkeys competing to see who gets to charge grandma $10,000.00 A MONTH for a "very special" care home, in the name of dealing with those same behavior problems when they emerge among the wealthy. It's really a quite disgusting racket, but nobody wants to talk about it. Once again, that's how we got the nickname Uncle Nobody, because yep, Nobody is going to insist that we talk about these things, out loud, where the neighbors not only might hear, but where their complicit denial will no longer be accepted.

So yeah, back to the work thing. If you wanted to know what I do for a living, you'd have to show up, unplanned and unprepared to stand with people who deserve not just our moral support, but our physical, bodily, and life-choice support, in the most mundane ways imaginable. You'd have to stay tuned for the kāhea (the call), for when needed to show up for others the way we hope they will show up for us, when we are in need. Because, if we don't show up for others when they call, why should they ever be there for us?

Perhaps some readers don't consider any of this real work, and that is, of course, your prerogative; but for us, all of this is the only work that we've ever known and the only work that we have any interest in doing. So if you, society, or anyone else tells us that we have to do something else, or be punished by lack of income, we'll take the punishment. Already have, for decades. And this is why we run the risk of losing supporters here, because there's no changing people who don't see things this way. What's new today is the fact that I no longer care about that. The goal is to build a genuine community of support, a community of patrons who joyfully and enthusiastically contribute as much as they can to empower this shared work, not as little as they can, in order for us to continue to do our real work.

Does it make sense? Is it upsetting? The second is totally fine, so long as the first is also true. If the first is not true, then please, either send us a direct message here, on Signal, or in the comments so that we can clarify. Then, if  it's still upsetting, well, you can decide what you want to do with that. We're not in charge of that process. You are. Our job is to just keep writing what seems to be emerging as our own Book of True Self. That's what's happening here. That's the job. That's the work, and while we're needing to deeply clarify some of the principles that animate our work here, and it might seem a bit terse or sharp in places, there is an absolutely sacred obligation of truth to be crisp and clear.

Similar to tangents, what many people discredit as a rant, is often, actually, called PASSION; and the term rant is often leveled as a criticism by those who have never found a single drop of passion, within their own lives. So, to make themselves feel better, or feel superior, or who knows what other unconscious or subconscious reason, such persons accuse the passionate activist, the change agent, the entrepreneur, or the imagineer of ranting. By labeling passion as ranting, the labeler simultaneously discredits and devalues the expression of passion in the theater of society, while elevates themselves in the narrative hierarchy, relative to the perceived inconvenience of the labeled ranter. Very, very Jordan Peterson-eque. But I could rant on this all day long, so for now, we'll save this for later, too, if that's okay.

Alas, clarity and integrity do not necessarily mean simplicity, so if you can't or just don't want to keep up with every tributary that tangents off from the main river here, that's okay. We do, of course, hope and intend that the value you do derive from this new format will always far exceed the support level that you choose to bless us with, month to month, because. this is what we do for a living.

We'll continue to curate and create content on salient topics that is as simple as possible, but no simpler. Personally, I just can't any longer allow myself to feel held hostage to some kind of American dumbest common denominator in my writing, or my life. The tyranny of idiocracy is what has led to the current crisis in countless ways, and even if it's too late to really undo the damage done, I can still spend the rest of my time on Earth working toward that end -- mitigating, reversing, and regenerating healing and uplifting conditions -- because such a cause is just and noble in its own right, not because victory is certain. To only undertake tasks in which we know for certain we can triumph, is a tragically self-limiting and therefore life-limiting way to live. E kala mai. Just no can.

I've learned, or remembered, that I didn't incarnate into this world to merely, barely survive. I came to help all of us thrive, that's embodied in the world that works for everyone pledge. In Hawaiian they have a saying, "it's a kākou thing." In Southern Africa's Nguni Bantu or Xhosa traditions, "it's an ubuntu thing." In America, it's supposed to be an "e pluribus unum" thing, and in genuine, non-narcissitic Sacred Oneness, all are these amount to the same thing; but somewhere, the genuine Oneness lost its sense of naʻau. It's gut core moral compass; because for many humans, sadly that compass was smashed almost from birth. It's the reliability of that compass that enables us to truly be, hear, naʻau, in a an authentic, integrated way, rather than in a frenetic, dishelved, constantly plotting, planning, and scheming way, all in the vain pursuit of controlling the uncontrollable. Because we have somehow either lost, or never had, a deeply rooted sense of connection to the ground of our own being.

So forgive me for feeling like maybe I earned every penny of my liberation from wage slavery and forgive me if I don't play by whatever set of rules that you, my closest friends, or this society, says I should play by. Nobody plays perfectly by the rules, but I definitely did my very best, honest and most sincere best, at every moment of the journey to this present moment.

Do you detect a few nanograms of bitterness in the text you've just read? Do you really think you're entitled to condemn that, given the shared journey we've just reviewed? Maybe, dear reader, if you do find yourself prone to judgement, first take a look at your own toxic dump of bitterness, then come picking at the specks of it in my eye, right?
Well, who'd have seen that coming? Not us! But also, we're working toward an ethic of radical non-editing of our experience, a Book of True Self that is constantly being written and lived, all day, every day, in every way. So there it is. Judge away, if feel you're qualified to condemn us in the present moment.
As unlikely as it may seem, that rather sharpish tangent connects quite neatly and precisely to another circle of concentric circles, consisting of an entirely different category of content.

I've often seen, heard, or read authors explaining that they write because they have to, not in order to accomplish any particular objective. While understanding that intellectually, it's only recently that I've begun to directly experience that for myself. But what good is writing, without an audience? Well, it's good for the writer; because writers have to write. But isn't that the height of selfishness, arrogance, and narcissism? I don't know. Is a whale's need to whale narcissitic? A dolphin's need to dolphin? These are some of examples of inner dialogs that have kept my own writing under wraps for so long. Why am I writing? For whom? Toward what end? All the while, the inner critic constantly berates: you're so selfish for just sitting there researching and writing all day. Get up and go do some real work, you lazy ass. Why aren't you plowing the fields or planting the crops? Nobody can eat your stupid words, ass****.

Actually, it's not just an inner critic, I got that same message from my own dad, my mother-in-law, in addition to plenty of other all-too-real humans in my life, over the years. 
But in their defense, even the devastation of their behavior, including physically ripping the headphones off my head while I was working on the computer, or grabbing me by the lapels and banging my head off the living room block wall, all of that pales in comparison to the persistent condemnation of the inner critic.  His/her voice ... well, they're kind of gender amorphous in my case, to be perfectly honest; taking on whatever identity will be most incriminating, dismissive, contemptuous, condescending, and devaluing to the writer, given current conditions. You see, I have a very zen inner critic. A very dark dharma realm inner critic; one that has zero interest in the outside world; it only wants to destroy the writer's will, and bring into submission to a some kind of vile regime, red in tooth and claw, and to do so from the inside out. The inner critic's objective is the exact opposite of liberating zen practice. Alas, this connects us to yet another tangent.

Which conveniently brings me precisely back to the point of the point of tangents, which you'll find in the crescendo of today's short, four-minute nanopodcast entry. Hope you'll listen and multiplex with the text, for no other reason that the pursuit of curiosity.

Curiosity might have killed the cat; but we are not cats. Cats are fine, but the number of nanoscopic, narcissistic, neurolinguistic, micro-moments that embedded and enmeshed false or self-destructive memes, which then took root as convictions, becoming hard-wired into the very delicate circuits of our prefrontal cortex; that number can be shocking to discover in the process of unpacking, and writing our own Book of True Self. The sheer number of such NLP suggestions that became effectively hard-wired somewhere amidst a network of 80 to 100 million neurons, each connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, means there are up to a trillion synapes that could be culptrits or complicit in perpetuating deeply embedded dysfunctions into our cognition. All through no fault of our own, at least initially, and all too often placed there in childhood in order to carefully control both our thinking and our behavior. No wonder the task of root-cause analysis of disatisfaction or suffering in our lives can sometimes feel so overwhelming that we just want to give up. "A trillion neurons?" we might think, "F*** THAT!" And that's exactly the intended outcome for whoever or whatever conditions wired those circuits into us, in the first place. When we give up on that level, when we give up control of our own thinking, our own agency in auditing that thinking in order to correct and rebalance it, our own ultimately liberating, intrinsic power of infinite curiousity, we can lose our very soul's song. This is why narcissistic abuse, if it could be seen or measured like a kitchen knife thrust into our backs in what should be the complete safety of our own kitchens or living rooms, would carry the same criminal consequences. In the not too distant future, as our brain imaging and understanding improve, this might even become the case. However, as we've made the points we hoped to cover here, we'll mercifully leave the additional golden tangents of neuro-governance, informed consent, emotionality, amorality, egoism, and universal dignity for another time.

It's been a bit of an intermittent effort to reclaim this curiousity, as we've started and stopped dabbling with the podcast idea a few times in this space, but there are some changes underway that might make it stick, this time. Patreon has raised its audio size limit to 512MB, which is more than double the previous size. So, attached here is just a quick audio entry to update about these changes and some current thinking about new directions for this space, as we've shared here. As always, thanks for braving the journey with us, birth, aging, and death aren't for wimps, and we take the fact that you've read this far as direct experiential evidence that we are not surrounded by wimps. Quite the contrary. At the end of the day, it may finally turn out that we are indeed the champions, my friends.