The Risk of Letting Go

The Katun River in Altai Mountains

You know it is cold outside when you blink a few times and the ice on your lashes locks your eyelids shut.  It is approximately -37 C (-33 F) here in Barnaul Siberia now, and I am thinking seriously about the risk of just “letting go.”  The cold has a way of sticking it to you… right in your face, and anywhere else it can find an opening.  It creeps under your clothes and into your bones; and it screams out coldly, silently, for a reply.  But you go on hunting and foraging, and trudging around trying to find a warmer clime to inhabit.  If you are lucky you find it. If not, you wind up here, in Siberia.

There are many opinion makers running around today, suggesting how we might escape the likely outcome of our current predicament – whether that is insulating ourselves from the bitter Siberian cold, or escaping the anticipated heatwave that’s forecasted to bring with it a swift end to our civilized accomplishments.  Everybody has proposed solutions.  Nobody has the answers.  And Altai Krai is not a place for everyone; at least not just today, not at thirty-seven below zero and counting.

There was a Russian nationally televised special program last month in which I (that’s right, yours truly) was the opening  act for the latest installment in a series on the future of Siberia, and Altai Krai, pending global collapse. It was presented as only truly dedicated and experienced Russian propagandists can do so – with pure artifice and fantasy; as if my personal “reasons” for coming to Altai were thoroughly conscious, strictly rational, and purely manipulative acts, intended to stake my claim to a piece of their “Shambala” while I await the coming global apocalypse.

Everybody has motives, and Russian propagandists (errr… news jockeys) perhaps a bit more so than others.  And they would insist on ascribing motives to all other actors in the universe, whether or not those motives are real, imagined, or simply convenient for the story at hand.  Perhaps they do so with some good reason, because hidden agendas and ulterior motives seem to be the coin of the realm here in mama rodina. But the universe itself has no agenda. No motives. It simply is.  We, on the other hand, constantly work on perfecting and protecting our sense of the real; but unassuming nature has its way of interrupting even the most sophisticated of our technologies and our plans.  We must learn to accustom ourselves, as Siberians have, in the face of such “cold” biting facts.  Just look at New Jersey!

We cannot help where, or to whom, we were born.  We cannot easily alter the structure of our physiology, our biology, or the construction of our cultural baggage.  We are who we are.  So, what can we do?  That becomes the central challenge.  What is this person, this self, this ego, with whom I identify?  At this stage in our cultural development, how much is natural (i.e., ground) and how much artifice, superstructure?

Maybe the Upanishads had it right all along: the soul of man is indistinguishable from that of the universe.  Non-duality! Maybe that is what was meant by the primitive Pacific Islander’s speech about mana or the Lakota Indian term, wakanda.  And perhaps that is what makes ancient shamans so valuable, so successful, particularly Siberian shamans. They have an intuitive grasp of that connectedness, the intertwining – non-duality.  In this view, we are not far from the concept of the Tao – therein lies the heart of non-dualistic apperception; and there lies the road to “letting-go,” wei wu wei or as Heidegger said, after the German mystic Meister Eckhart, Gelassenheit.  Here is where the essence of participation lies, where the doors of perception open wide, yet again.

In the meantime, we Americans mourn the death of a valiant member of Seal Team Six (you know: the same gang of guys who assassinated Osama bin Laden).  Yet, we could care less about all the “collateral damage” (those dead citizens) we have left in mangled heaps throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere.  Just send in the drones or the Seals, and look the other way.  The Israelis are also experts in this field, as I understand.  This is a consequence of “not-letting-go;” this is a result of dualistic thinking stretched out to its logical conclusion – us vs. them, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.  Is that what we want to continue to propagate?  This is not a mystical issue folks; it is a matter of nature being what she is.  But, the moment we separate ourselves from her, and cordon off some sacred space called ego, superego, and all their prized possessions, that is the moment we cease to be players in the natural dance of predation, and take on the newly crafted role of righteous executioner and assassin.

Now, if you look at the unprovoked unraveling of the myth of Patraeus (the good General), you see not just one lonely soul perched upon a grandiose scaffolding; you see an entire culture… indeed a civilization built upon unsettled and shifting sands.  The entire artifice constructed of myths, half-truths, and unverifiable laws of physics that are believed simply because they produce results.  Well, if you want results, and you want to witness what shifting sands can really look like with the help of a little water, just take a peek at the Jersey shoreline.

And these jokers in the community of Sea Bright, N.J., are seriously focused on rebuilding… simply because their civil law says they have the right to do so.  Are we a stupid people, or what?  And they want $37,000,000,000 in Federal Disaster Relief aid to do it, as well.  Not only have they teased, taunted, and thumbed their nose at the goddess – Gaia – but now they want someone to pay for their supreme act of hubris. Again, I ask you, are we stupid, or what?  Is there no humility, no sense of awe, no fear or trembling before the power of mother nature? Maybe “letting go” would be the most appropriate response for these newly homeless New Jerseyans.  After all, the sands of time do not appear to be on their side just now. Or perhaps, we should just let go of New Jersey. (Just kidding folks!)

Well, I have definitely wandered too far off the reservation here. I need to get back to tending the chrysanthemums. Huh? What chrysanthemums? Japanese poets were fond of scribbling haiku about these flowers. Didn’t you know?

When the winter chrysanthemums go,

there’s nothing to write about

but radishes. – Basho

Why chrysanthemums?  Why not?  They bloom late into the year and bring brilliant color and life as we move well into winter when all else in nature is faltering or dead.  And remember:

Well planted, in deep

Siberian snows;

even the chrysanthemums tremble. — (kC)

But, we need let them go as well. Ashes to ashes…chrysanthemums to chrysanthemums. It’s nature’s way.  It is neither good nor bad; it just is. The seasons pass without our concern and without our decision; it happens all of its own accord.

I can begin to sense the specific texture of non-duality in the proprioceptive sensation of muscle, tendon, and flesh, as my body spontaneously moves through space, orienting me in relation to concurrences there. Non-duality reveals itself principally as embodied-knowledge, opening me the world as I feel myself inhabiting, intertwined, and engaged with it. It is my knowing-body itself bodying-forth the sensate world as lived by me. Here, our strictly rational and objective distinctions between self-as-knower and body-as-vessel are dissolved, leading also to the dissolution of boundaries between embodied-self and world-as-lived. The subject IS the body (le corp-sujet), my flesh; and, my flesh IS the flesh of the world (la chair du monde).  The inline is outline, one and the same; so the distinction blurs, eventually folding in upon itself.  “Letting go” here may just mean letting the body-subject experience the inter-animation of its common factical grounding – a primal openness,  ek-stasis, or standing-out-into-the-world, that same ground upon which stands the entirety of the natural world as well as that of our artful constructions. This is not  a mystical experience, folks.  It is quite ordinary; at least we can surmise that it was so for nearly 2,000,000 years of our earliest hominid prehistory. It is just no longer an ordinary experience (i.e., a common apperception) for the current percipient – Homo historicus, Homo urbanus.

The risk of “letting go” is, of course, apparent madness – as judged by present standards. The risk of “holding tight” to our current state of mind and its cultural trajectory is however, quite simply, real insanity.