Radical Non-Resistance

Radical Non-Resistance

 - what it is, and why, in this moment in my, and our, history, I want to practice this -

I want to start by saying what it isn't.

When I say "non-resistance," I am not talking about a blind, numb, extraction of myself from the reality of what we see around us, in order to maintain my own "comfort" and so-called "sanity." I am not talking about what some people have called "toxic positivity," or "spritual bypass" of uncomfortable emotions. I am not talking about doing nothing in the face of present global events. But the "doing" I am going to describe is a very different sort of "doing" than what I think most of us feel is necessary.

I am also not proposing that what I am describing is what everyone should be doing. Part of radical non-resistance is not resisting the resistance that other people feel is necessary.

 -------

"Radical Non-Resistance," as a reasonable modus operandi, began to fully come together in my own mind in just the past few years, after a lifetime of trying to understand why the civilized human behaves like a cancer on the planet, and treats each other with such violent disrespect, and why I always felt like an uncomfortable alien in my society. I always felt that in order to know what to do with my life, I needed to understand reality as deeply as possible.

The story of how my understanding of reality has changed over my lifetime, and therefore my feeling about how to live my life, is not going to get told in this post. Suffice it to say, there have been a million little and big events and epiphanies that have gone into my evolution since 1964 when I was born, and where I am now is a place I could never have anticipated even existing, when I was young.

  -------------

There are a few fundamental cornerstones to the building of this MO. Here they are in no particular order. They are all interconnected.

1. I believe that our current modern civilized way of living on this planet is built on fundamentally untrue and fraudulent foundations, which means that it is guaranteed to fall apart at some point, in some way. The primary missing component of our present worldview is the existence of what I call divine dimensions, that this material world is created by, and comprised of, at it's core. 

2. I believe that humans HAVE lived in ways that are based on a more complete picture of reality, and which have therefore been able to continue in more or less stable ways for far longer than any of the various civilizations have survived.

3. I have no desire to see our present civilization continue its status quo of cancerous "economic growth." I think "sustainable development" is an untenable oxymoron, and I don't believe that making surface tweaks to laws or technology, (like the "green energy transition",) will allow it to continue indefinitely. I believe we need a total reset of worldview and of our relationship with fundamental reality, in order to continue as a species.

4. I believe that life on earth will continue, regardless of whether humans are a part of that, or whether we go the way of the dinosaurs. I don't know how the future of our species will play out. At the deepest level of myself, I am not attached to the outcome of our species survival. I am in love with the creative life force, and I trust it knows better than I do how to keep itself going.

All of the above points could be used as justification for radical dissociation from, and numbing of, the emotional fallout of our species' behavior. But there are other points to my worldview that make dissociation the antithesis of my MO.

5. I believe that the disconnection from our divine dimension has made it impossible for us to fully be present in our own bodies, which includes being able to allow the energies of emotions to flow naturally.

6. The two indigenous cultures that I have the most information about are the traditional Tzutujil Mayan of Guatemala, and the Dagara of West Africa. Both of these cultures have a very different relationship with emotions than we do in the civilized West. (Or the civilized East, for that matter.) For one thing, they both have frequent and intense grief rituals that allow people to discharge the Love that we feel is so painful when someone we love dies.

7. After hundreds or thousands of years, here in our society, of not doing our grief, or our anger or our fear, in safe and sacred ritual contexts, we have necessarily developed coping mechanisms and toxic traits and numbness and numerous other side effects of repressed emotional energies.

8. All these undischarged energies, in bodies that are disconnected from the divine, are what is driving the cancerous greed and addictions to consumption, and violence and need to find scapegoats for our misery.

Put all these things together, and what I arrive at is the understanding, both intellectual and visceral, that I need to do two things that my lineage has not been doing for many generations: connect to the divine in my body, and allow my undischarged emotional energies to come up and flow, in those divine energy channels.

So, how does this relate to "radical non-resistance?"

The events going on in the world around me are the thing that triggers the emotions in my body that need to be discharged. If I am triggered, I have 3 options:

1. I can try to ignore and re-suppress the energy, by distracting myself in various ways.

2. I can react by inflicting the triggered emotion on the people who triggered it, in an attempt to get them to change their behavior so that I don't have to feel whatever got brought up in me.

3. I can consciously become a conduit for the emotional resonance to flow in my body in a context of Love, which frees me of an old frozen layer that has been keeping me from being my full vibrant creative self. Or maybe it's not an old layer, but from the present. Either way, if I don't let it flow, it will become a block of my vitality.

Both 1 and 2 are forms of resisting the flow of energy that wants to happen in my body. Option number 2, which is resisting the external circumstances in order to keep myself from feeling what's coming up in my body, may result in some change in the external circumstances, but it does nothing to change the energy I'm carrying in my body, and some other event will trigger it again sooner or later. In my experience, option number 2 is much more likely to just result in resistance on the part of the person I'm trying to change, which only results in intense frustration for me.

Option number 3 is the one that has the potential to change the world in more than a surface-symptom sort of way. This is non-resistance to both the internal emotional resonance, and the external trigger.

Furthermore, if I believe that the ocean of undischarged emotions are what is causing all the pathological human behaviors that I see around me, I have to be willing to do my own work. If I can't do it, I can't expect anyone else to.  And when I try to do my own work, and discover how challenging it is, it should give me patience for those around me, though that isn't always the case.

The beautiful thing is that the resonance of my own grounded connection to my body can be felt by the bodies around me, and gives them permission to feel themselves as well. This is not a clean and simple phenomenon, because we all have a ton of resistance to feeling all the stuff we carry around, but the more I do it, the more I am incapable of re-suppressing things, regardless of who I'm with or how they might react, and all I can do is try to be a big enough container of Love to hold it all.

   ---------------

There are two reasons I am writing my thoughts about this. The first reason is because I want to clarify all the swirling thoughts in my head into a coherent narrative that I can remind myself of when I feel adrift and anxious. Most of the narratives that my mind has been spinning for the first 50 years of my life involved the ways in which the external world is causing me to feel the way I feel, which is a narrative that actually keeps me separate from my own body. I am trying to replace that narrative with a different one that, paradoxically, even though it's happening in my mind, returns me to my body when I feel myself abandoning it.

The second reason is that I know how soothing and validating it has been for me to hear other people say these kinds of things. Because it's so different from the standard narratives we hear, when I started to feel the reality of these other viewpoints, it brought up loneliness and fear of having my own viewpoint and experiences get rejected by the people around me. So, I am putting these thoughts into the world because these are the thoughts I have wanted to hear other people talk about, and I suspect I really am not as alone as it might seem.