Party Til the End?
My eyes widened in Dreamland. The beach at the south of Bali beckoned an evening dip after a sweaty day. A blessed bonus was the sunset, which promised transcendence early in the year’s final month. I ran to watch it from the surf.
The waves shined a metallic iridescence in the liminal light. Vivrant things, Q-tip might say, which burst to the surface with the force of life. Their quiet strength told who or what was in control, the only option to go with the flow.
I tread and bobbed under pastel neons that spread above and beyond. Cloud wisps set in the precise position to burst into psychedelia from the sun's last blast. Even without my glasses, I saw this was a ‘photos won’t do justice, so lie back and enjoy’ moment.
A thought about Michael Meade washed over. He spoke on his Living Myth podcast of how we are in dark times. True enough, at least per the bottomless news stream on screen, always ready at hand. He said it's our duty to face the darkness as a 'necessary precondition for a lighted world.'
My mind tried to settle scattered thoughts while my body floated idyllically. Held by and in paradise, I couldn't reconcile how so many had to play a much worse roll in life's crap shoot at that moment.
This human wasn’t evolved to know the calamities of millions many miles away. Its mind can’t capture what one million anything looks like. Nor will it fully know anyone's suffering outside its own, often full of it.
Yet, my understanding of Ethical Altruism placed me in a seeming quandary. If I knew someone was drowning, even out of my sight or vicinity, I must be compelled to action, to throw a lifesaver from wherever I am.
What should I do? How can I help? Help!
A few evenings later another sunset, nearly as magnificent, heralded a night of revelry. Savaya beach club's artifice was opulent, both its architecture and patrons. Floating over a coastal cliff and above a giant bar, a massive cube covered in crystal shifted colors across the spectrum. It recalled the gaudy aughts as lasers and projectors patterned the writhing crowd. The hoard grew, gathered to grind through sticky air to the deep grooves of an acclaimed DJ.
Why?
As lush bass lines and secondary cigarettes filled my chest, the question echoed through the night. What was the purpose? People starved and dogs ran wretched in the streets nearby, not to mention the human-induced havoc in so many dark corners abroad.
I thought of 9/11. Seventeen years old and two weeks into freshman year, I woke with a hangover that awful morning, poked by a hallmate to watch the attacks, already complete, now repeated on TV.
Confused and alarmed, then and through the day, I found myself at the bar next to campus that night. Detached and distant amid the fray, I watched a crowd of equally ignorant kids. A jingoistic "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chanted through the night.
Why?
What were these people doing? More to the point: What was I doing there? I couldn’t fathom why we were partying, drinking our minds away. Shouldn’t we have been in solemn reflection, mourning the loss, reflecting on how our world had changed? Adult guidance or supervision was absent. Though I doubted if there was much to go around elsewhere.
What I thought I saw in others – escapism, intentional ignorance of evil and wrongdoing in the world – was all in me. These evasions of my worlds, external and within, would continue for four years of school (five actually) and almost two decades after.
In recent years, different teachers impelled me to look, to hone my awareness, and awaken from the dream of my illusory life. Then I might discover what was real, and what must be done.
———
This year was filled with contrast and contradiction. Early on, I realized a long held, waking dream: to share music I loved for friends in my first official DJ set. It was a raving success. As the weekend celebration of a mate's 30th closed, unprecedented floods flowed in.
The water wrought unspeakable destruction to the land I lived and loved on for two pandemic years. It stranded me with others for three days in a kind stranger’s home. Then it called me to help others when I could descend from the mountain refuge.
The urge to rush to the rescue was fierce, unshakable, though it made me run without my head. I raced to answer a family’s cry for help on Facebook. When I reached the destruction in Lismore, sights that mirrored post-Katrina New Orleans burned light through my ignorance, making me question if I was helping or causing more harm.
Weeks later, I retreated from trying to save the world to look within. For two weeks, I began my first course with a school dedicated to awakening. The dive deeper into my story through self-inquiry brought light to unseen belief.
For too long, before and after my mom’s death, I thought it was my job, my duty, dare I say my dharma, to save her. As I listened to a woman onscreen, I was stunned by an obvious realization. Before mom died, she had done her best to provide the best for me. After her death, her inheritance supported me and my current mission: to save me from myself, or from who I thought I was.
I had it backwards the whole time. When I stopped, I could hear others who spoke for me. They reflected what I couldn’t see when I repeated tired thoughts. Now was my opportunity to receive the profound wisdom of silence. In it, from it, true healing might occur: the recognition of innate wholeness, the peace of emptiness. From what better place could I serve others?
To paraphrase Ram Dass: It’s worse to do nothing because you’re not perfect than to do something while you’re imperfect.
In mid June, I returned to my birthplace – home – after two long-short years, and I hugged my father on the day in his honor. In the summer, I savored the hot, sweet fruits of life. Spanish sunsets in white-clad pueblos, flamingo concerts and dance, and sumptuous food and romance.
As fall descended, I visited the teacher of the awakening school in Oregon. Sitting with him, looking further within, realization repeated, and deepened. I can take his invitation to stop, and I must. To better see what is meant for me, to listen to my heart, hear the language of love, and ultimately serve the world.
I arrived in Bali to finish the year reunited with dear friends. I met an esteemed mentor in person, shared more sublime sunsets and ecstatic dances, then visa-ran to Thailand for a music festival to boot.
On the first day of frolicking, edible-fueled paranoia erased my initial, false confidence. At first: "Wow, look at all the fascinating folk. I'm one of them, a festival pro. I've got this." Hours later: "Why are they all looking at me? They're talking about me, laughing at me. I've gotta get outta here!"
Like a wish to a genie gone awry, the substance enhanced my experience, just not as I imagined. It magnified the thought stream that bubbled below the surface of my awareness. My subconscious soliloquy, an endless sonnet, came to the fore in all its inglory.
In the moment and after, I knew: It's all mental. Projection. All my 'stuff' is my own creation. Though someone else stamped the initial impressions, it's my responsibility to carve and color them, craft them to my benefit. Take the rubbish of belief, all limited and false, and make art from it, play with it, or just toss it out.
–––
On new year's eve I rode my motorbike in the hot morning traffic of Ubud's main road. The end of a two hour podcast piped through my earbuds. Daniel Schmactenberger and Jamie Wheal, two minds I've long admired, discussed the existential risks humanity faces, and their reasons for optimism against the massive odds of us not "making it."
Jamie replied: "Beautiful. So yeah, that notion of leaving space for grace, right? The idea that there is always that miracle element. And Kevin Kelly has that beautiful quote where he's like, it's way easier to imagine the devil than God because of basically the second law of thermodynamics. But everything also, from the flowers to you and me, are highly improbable, and we have to get better at believing in the improbable.
Daniel: Yea, and feeling it even before we have a thing to believe in. And then the other thing is, I don't believe that humanity is going to make it. I also don't believe it's not going to make it. I know either could happen and my disposition is not just because I'm sure we're going to make it. So if I have that certainty, it's that I'm sure that I want my life oriented to what could help it happen. And I know that everyone who is sure that we aren't has unwarranted certainty.
JW: And disconnection from life force.
DS: Yes, yes, and so the other thing is, I want my life oriented to the best possible future, but I also want it oriented to the most honoring of life now. So if we don't make it, I still wouldn't change any of how I'm living because it is coming from the recognition of the radical amazement that I get to be alive for a second at all, right?
Like, I had this experience. This is so fundamental. I remember as a teenager looking at a sunset and feeling this experience of, I would incarnate this life and go through every fucking hell and difficulty for this moment because it's so, like, as opposed to no experience at all, ever. It's so incredible. And then I'm like, I've already had thousands of moments like that. And, if I have had thousands of moments that are worth an entire life, it's all gravy from here in terms of what's in it for me, right?
Like, it just keeps being this embarrassment of riches that the beauty of life keeps happening and it's all worth it. And that doesn't mean the pain isn't painful. It just means I've experienced pains which were excruciating, and I can't feel them right now, and I don't choose to dwell on them. And I've experienced beauties that were awe inspiring and I do dwell on them, and so it's worth it right?
And so there's also, if we don't make it, I don't want to be just partying in the Bahamas. I want to be in sacred service to life because it's… It's the only thing that actually makes sense."
Tears suddenly streamed down towards my quivering stomach as I approached an intersection. I embraced the liquid emotion his words summoned while keeping balance on the bike.
Daniel's polymathic genius and articulation of new, complex topics has blown my mind for years. I thought I'd connected with him on a mental level, ignorant that the existential risks he often discusses summon reactions deeper within me.
I could no longer ignore his impact on all of my bodies: spiritual, emotional, physical AND mental. A sad, delightful gratitude overwhelmed me. For the sunset weeks prior, and so many like it before, and the countless moments of improbable beauty in my life.
Jamie answered: "Beautiful. And that feels very resonant with the Arjuna-Krishna story in the Bhagavad Gita, right? Some reconciliation with the impossibility of this thing. Also, that we're never off the hook for playing our part to the hilt."
As I turned left at the giant white statue of Arjuna loading his bow, his words electrified my spine. My body quivered and I grinned with glee, bathing in blatant synchronicity.
———
On new year's day, I wondered how many moments I've been blessed to experience that were worth a lifetime. I listened to medicine music I'd shared with friends the night before. Their elevated vibrations reminded of hypersensory ceremonies in which ecstasis exploded through me. And ineffable gratitude, again, for life, for Pachamama/Mother Earth, for the next breath, for my body with all its pain and pleasure.
It inevitably reminded me of temptations – past and present – to find a permanent fiesta, or sometimes siesta. And of my surrender to them, instant neurochemical gratification.
Hearing Daniel & Jamie on the land I rested affirmed my true wish, my deepest desire. I felt it on my first visit to Bali five and half years before. I came here first for emotional refuge. Shortly after my arrival came spiritual reawakening.
In a mysterious gathering, I opened to the improbable, then heard a vague yet clear message. Out of seeming nowhere, an unmistakable calling rang through me:
I am here to help others.
In the months and years that followed, I slowly grappled with how to do this. I learned I had to separate my codependent neediness to fix others and heal the world from a genuine calling and desire to be there for others.
I knew why I was here: to give myself to something greater.
The how was still a mystery.
–––
James Blake's 'Tell Them' booms through my earbuds on another ride early in the year. His lyrics and Metro Boomin’s bass still deliver reliable shivers to my body long after first hearing it.
After learning Blake’s inspiration, a one night stand, I hold to my initial interpretation, deeper than the seemingly superficial source. It's just as well. The metaphor richens when I lay it next to that of my life.
I borrow and bend Blake's lines, begging advance forgiveness:
In life, I've been alone, a wandering soul. I had to move on from the squandered soil of my former home.
In my travels, I got what I came for – or so I thought – over and over: romantic connections, innumerable thrills. Post-conquest or experience, I left for another. In my heart lay a hall of horrors, which I tried to deny impossibly.
I can't return the sacred time I've stolen, from myself and others. The facts of my actions – constant movement on and away – betray the way I've felt, and still feel. Endless temptation delays my right to heal each time I decide to stay for another quick dopamine hit.
I didn't mean to stay so long in the snake pit, the seemingly bottomless well of my serpentine demons. The earthly, the feminine, comforts and numbs. Yet in succumbing to its delights, I delay and curtail healing my wound in relation to it, and I prolong my suffering. I've defended my ego against the thing I know it, and I, need most.
I haven’t known how to stop, not in practice. I'm so afraid.
I'm here, now, to tell them – to tell You – what I came to earth for, what my heart is calling forth in the daydream of my life:
Sacred service to Life.
To step into it, I must stop and face my deepest fear: of darkness, losing it all, being nothing.
I've said it before, so I'll say it once more, though I've said enough already.
Now is the time for my action to do the talking.
The truth is seen with open eyes, awakening in – or from – this collective dream.