The Ash Reels, 1 & 2; Latent Insight
Updates on Spirituality, Mystery, Obviousness
I’m writing elsewhere these days, mostly in ways that don’t fit on Substack. So I’m going to not try to fit them here too much. A few updates:
I’ve been having some chats and stitching together transcripts. The first two are published: chats on Spirituality and Mystery, respectively. I've included some clips of each below. A couple others, titled “Shaman” and “Radagast” are on the way.
I’m redoing my website from scratch, which includes opening up my 1-on-1 sessions again, for the first time in awhile. My focus is on exploring what becomes obvious when we stop bracing against clarity. What’s clear when I’m allowed to see what I see, to know what I know, to want what I want, without resisting or repressing it?
That’s it for now. I’ve been writing a lot lately — essays and art and a lot that blurs between them — and will hopefully be putting more of that out soon. For now, here’s some clips from the transcripts I just published.
Ash Reel 1: Spirituality
[…]
K: There’s still a weird tension in my throat listening to you — like you’re dancing around something, or leaving it out.
R: That feels true. And functional. I don’t think the move is to blurt everything out, any more than the move is to just hold it in. Feeling through it right now, it feels like the move is just holding things for myself and not needing to verbalize them for others. But definitely needing to embody them for myself. They can be unsaid if they’re felt. Until I embody them, I’m maybe not even capable of saying them correctly.
K: Your voice changes when you say that. It feels good. At least in me, it feels like I relax when I hear your voice change like that.
R: That reflection helps. Thanks.
I think we have a very literal verbal culture that assumes we have to say everything or it isn’t real. But there’s a lot of stuff that, when you say it, it de-potentiates the real thing — the driving force under the words. Or people’s preconceptions about the words get in the way. They stop hearing the thing under the words. And what’s under the words is precious to me here. I don’t like taking risks with it.
K: That sounds very reasonable. You were saying something about the story you’ve been living and the aversion to it — or to spirituality.
R: Yeah. I was just thinking we’d gotten off track. But when you ask that, I actually think we’re exactly, exactly on track now.
This fear, disgust, embarrassment reaction to the projected future I see for myself in the spiritual world — where I write some books, do some retreats, that scene. It feels like it feeds into and feeds on this illusion that the verbalizing, explanatory, explicitness orientation is where things happen. And I think that’s a lie. Or at least the view has become so inflated and common and unquestioned that its current shape is a lie. Feeling that lie feels itchy in my organs.
It’s like I imagine living that life and I want to tear my skin off and escape it. Bloodletting. Contamination. Purging. I want it out of me. I want me out of it.
K: Jesus.
R: I’m surprised by the intensity. It really feels that way. Such an intense cellular no response.
K: Is there a yes response somewhere?
R: It’s quieter. I think because the thing I’m a yes to doesn’t quite exist yet — or at least doesn’t exist to me. It doesn’t feel real to me. I feel like it doesn’t exist out there either, but that’s not a real signal one way or the other. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, from inside myself.
But I do feel that way. Like it doesn’t exist.
[…]
R: Definitely a core wound here, yeah — and something very precious at the center of that wound. It’s like... this might be wishful thinking, but it feels true, it’s like as the wound gets more healed, it keeps pulling in healing energy from the rest of me, and directing it outward. Like the wound made a channel for it to flow outward. Like it’s not just trying to heal me and my wound, it’s trying to heal that same type of wound wherever it is, whoever has that wound around me.
And I get a really strong protective urge on behalf of others, on behalf of the path. There’s some way that my own defenses can get recruited to defend things that really matter. When I can really do the conscious version instead of the unconscious version.
I think a lot of defenses are like that. Not that I’m especially healed or integrated in this, obviously. It’s definitely a messy area for me. But I think when our defenses get more conscious, less conditioned-reflexive, they can serve a really beautiful function, defending things and people that truly do need defending. That are healed by having someone defend them. By being treated like they matter enough to defend.
K: Back to the original thing to wrap up: spirituality, your aversion to it, while also clearly having it as a core of your life. Does anything feel clearer about that now?
R: I think, actually, yeah. Part of what feels clear is that there’s something in here about weird soul-led individual paths that feels very worth defending to me. And I don’t see room for those in religion, and I don’t see room for them in spirituality. I see maybe more room for them there, but not much, and not much guidance to do them without losing yourself to either psychosis or gravity wells or pure lostness. There’s something important to me here.
And I’m noticing that we never got close to the second topic I wanted to talk about: mystery. And this actually feels clearly connected to mystery now, we’ll definitely need to pick that up next time.
And to be clear, actually, the way I’m saying ‘mystery’ here is way closer to the fiction genre than to the usual spiritual connotation.
Ash Reel 2: Mystery
K: So we were going to pick up today with mystery, but first you wanted to add something you feel like we missed last time.
R: Yeah. Something about my aversion to spirituality being related to the explicit verbal, written, legible bias of this world. Books, lectures, guided meditations — all of that has its place. What draws me is some distinction I feel between about and from.
I don’t want to write about spirituality. I want to write from a lived stance of spiritual reality. I don’t want to talk about energy or essence. I want everything I say and do to come from coherent essential energetic embodiment. I don’t want my life to be about the sacred. I want to live from sacredness without consciously thinking about it or having an agenda for it.
A big part of my current ick toward spirituality is that it has so much aboutness to it, and so vanishingly little fromness.
K: That feels like the — I know you don’t like this idea — but the whole, ‘you know your spirituality is working if it turns you into a normie’ thing.
R: Yeah, I really don’t like that one. To the extent that it’s true, I don’t think it’s true in any of the ways that people talk about it. Or not the meanings it gets recruited for in tweets and substacks and expensive meditation retreats.
Hillman has this great quote—something like: ‘all the great teachings say that in the beginning you’re simple, in the middle you’re complicated, and in the end you’re simple again. The problem is that the people listening to these teachings are simple in the beginning, and they think, “Oh good, I’ll skip that middle bit.”’
That sums up a lot of it. Like, if I hear one more entrepreneurship-as-spiritual-path person talk about the ox-herding pictures — you know the ox-herding pictures?
K: From Zen, right?
R: Yeah. These Zen pictures that show a version of the spiritual path, and the final one is called Return to the Marketplace.
K: Ah
R: And people cite this as evidence of, like, this very Protestant Western idea that if your spiritual path has worked, you’ll go back to your job, back to engaging in the marketplace, back to being indistinguishable from any other, I don’t know, architect or cashier or CFO or whatever. That you return to the marketplace.
But the Buddha in that final picture? It’s Hotei, the Laughing Buddha. He’s this itinerant, wandering holy man who cheers everyone up and gives them gifts from his magic bag, brings wisdom and happiness, and moves on to the next village. Kind of Santa Clause vibes, fat happy guy giving presents from his magic sack. The marketplace is literally a marketplace, a big public square where all the people come and go to buy and sell things.
I would find it more hilarious if it was less frustrating. People using a wandering gift-giving mystic as evidence that the spiritual path should ideally lead you to plugging yourself back into the economy to create shareholder value.
[…]
R: Every single piece of [your life, your soul] is just mystery, perfectly constructed mystery. There’s something that you’re supposed to see, something that you’ve been given to understand. Not to understand in a speaking about way, but in a speaking from way; not from meta, but from infra. There’s something you’ve been given to know that’s unique to the shape of you, you specifically.
Yeah, it’s not a thing you’re supposed to understand explicitly or cognitively. It’s something you’re supposed to become through the process of living exactly the frequency that your life is shaped by and shaped within.
If you could skip to the end, zoom out, see what your soul is about, what your life is, what you’ve been given to ken, you’d miss the point. Like a mystery that you check the Wikipedia page to find the answer for, instead of actually reading or watching it, instead of actually investing yourself in it and allowing it to move you the way that it moves you over time, step by step, bit by bit, always clarifying, revealing, hiding, revealing again, misleading, so that it can lead you where it needs to go.
Right, it’s the aboutness and fromness again, seeing versus becoming. We’re so greedy to know about ourselves and our lives and our souls, to see and explicitly understand what we are, how things end, to control how it goes, the way that we think it should go from any given point in the song. But all of that is beside the point.
Worse, it short circuits the becoming process. If you had the twists and turns of a mystery spoiled for you, something is short circuited about what it was trying to show you. You can understand it in the explicit aboutness mode, you can get a bumper sticker understanding; but the becoming, the fromness mode, that potential has evaporated. The soul of the thing has been interrupted.
K: The last couple conversations, feel like they’re crystallizing for me. Mind if I could try out what I’m seeing and you can cross check me on it?
R. Please do.
K: Your life is all about the religious impulse or the soul. And when you step into places that are also supposed to be about that, you see them as doing the aboutness thing, which you see as short circuiting the actual becoming process. And the becoming seems to be the most important thing to you, being shaped by your soul into the thing that you’ve been given to be.
And you’re like terrified of getting into situations that would short circuit that, that would interfere with either your soul’s ability to keep shaping you or your ability to keep getting shaped by soul.
[…]
K: From outside the static hell realm, does it feel like anything is clearer?
R. Coherence. Coherence is important. And coherence comes from becoming. And the only thing to become is my own soul. And I can only do that if I’m free to open to the actual process of my soul without interference.
Our world has, in so many ways, lost coherence. It thinks coherence and integrity are myths, even, or saintly unattainable things. What I’m standing for is the importance of becoming in a world that thinks explicit understanding is good enough. Because becoming is the only thing that brings coherence.
Coda: The Ash Reels & Me
I’ve gotten a lot out of seeing multiple angles on people, their personal sides as well as their professional sides, their spiritual sides as well as their material sides. For example, my sense of Carl Jung doesn’t just come from his academic work, but from the Red Book, his personal writings, biographies by those who knew him, etc. It helped me contextualize him, early on, knowing what type of person he was, what type of mind he had — and how his insights emerged from and appealed to his vary particular shape. How the shape of a person and the insights that fit them are inseparable things — there is no one size fits all practice, no single teaching or philosophy that suits every shape of person.
It helped me give myself permission to be my own specific shape, and not take on people’s exhortations that their tradition or practice or teacher had The One Effective Truth, and everyone else could either get on board or be a little lost.
In spiritual circles, people are often presenting only one dimension of themselves — just “The Teacher,” or just “The Sage” or just “The Relational Being.” This seems inevitable, it seems like good branding, it seems like good focus and distillation — and it seems like not something I want to do, when I can help it.
I could clean up these transcripts more, take out some of my personal history and defenses and fumbles. But I think if I have anything worth sharing, it wants to be shared in the context of Me — of this shape of human to whom certain things make sense and seem salient, and to whom other things seem irrelevant or harmful. It might click something into place for you, noticing what shape of teachings click in with this shape of human — and how you might relate to that, or get clarity on why you really really don’t relate to it.
…There’s also a risk some of you will just cherry pick my shortcomings and use it as a good reason to dismiss or attack me. It’s happened before. I assume it will happen again. Seems like the risk of being seen, so I’ll just keep an eye on how that feels.
Anyway, that’s me. I’ll be around.
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Is the audio for these conversations available anywhere?