On leadership

The most important thing for a leader is to not be overly controlling and manipulative. The core of being a positive leader is to allow all of your followers their full reign of creativity and intelligence. You need to interact with them as living and changing organisms, and not merely view them from a templated abstraction about who they are.  If you only see them objectified through their various labels, such as “followers”, and you try and control them thusly, you will only succeed in snuffing out their fun and vibrancy and exhausting a lot of energy on your part.

There are many leaders, some of them are energetically dead and some are energetically alive. The energetically dead people tend to be aggressive or unbalanced leaders. They control the group from a position of authority that is fueled by a feeling of strength derived from tension. An energetically alive leader uses creativity and natural love to fuel his/her interactions. He/she does not need to hold up a strong ego to do battles for him/her, but simply interacts with everybody head on, completely relaxed.

Consider a tai chi form, which is a long sequence of precise movements. Many people think their way through the form. They guide their arms and legs into position through their ideas, concepts and principles they have mentally scribed as Law for their actions. This is a poor leadership of the body, because the body parts remain dead and tense while the mind simply guides them into the correct mold. The good practitioner knows not to interfere with or manipulate his/her body’s movements. The intelligence of the body has been strengthened through the practice of tai chi and each body part “knows” what to do on its own. The mind continues to analyze, but this analyzation no longer interferes with the aliveness of the body. This is a good leadership of the mind, because it fulfills its role but maintains respect for the conscious freedom of each of its “subjects.”

Consider how a snake moves its body. Its consciousness is distributed throughout its body, so that every body part can effortlessly move in coordination with every other part. This gives the animal incredible vibrancy. While a leader must be good at guiding his group pragmatically, safely and strategically, they must also have a vibrancy of aliveness so that a knowledgeable and clever mind does not overshadow his/her direct experience of his “possy”. Thus, the integration of this tai chi  ch’uan principle can directly improve the internal balance of a leader- enhancing his leadership skills and his ability to comfortably connect to his crew. 

Gnostic dimensions and Taoist Principles

Just an idea of how Taoist principles and Christian mythology can be integrated to create healing: 

I used to have a teacher that would tell me to go to Hell when I would try and be clever. It took me a while (and an excellent tai chi teacher) to get the reference: he was talking about Gnostic hell. Hellfire: the agony that cleanses one of the sinful, mortal physical world. This can also be considered moving into the dimension of all of the "Dead" parts of oneself that are ignored. It is common to want to live life comfortably, in a fluid and functioning mode. So, people abide by all of their knowledge and use it as a template for interaction. This is denying God, because God, in Gnostic terms and Taoist principles, is beyond knowledge and beyond reason. So, if people live a life purely rationally, pragmatically, linearly, controlled, collected, analytically, scientifically etc. then they are denying God. They must, in order to be cleansed, "go to Hell." The hellfire burns away the illusions of knowledge and fact and strips away the power of reason to control attention. This is not a pleasant process. However, it is a necessary step in order to eventually reach "Heaven" which is the world of being connected to God. So, Hell is being stripped of reason, Heaven is living consciously within the Kingdom of God. As one generates aliveness in the dead parts of themselves, in Hell, they are simultaneously increasing their connection to God in the Heaven Realm. Justice can only be done to the realm of reason (knowledge- the mundane plane) when it can be viewed for what it is from the non-local dimension of Heaven. With the two simultaneously existing in different dimensions of "reality" they interact and manifest powerful and healing creative action.

Preaching

Before you begin to preach, understand that your cleverness and beliefs on the level of mental concept and ideas only contribute to the strength of that level. It may give you social power, the ability to convince, to manipulate, to control. Yet this kind of strengthening denies and usurps all of the rest of you- all of the parts of you that are not oriented towards thinking and goal-making, winning, attacking. You are not one specific thing. When you act, be absolutely sure that your actions are healing actions that are a result of all of the parts of you experiencing life and relating to each other. This distributed attention to all of the parts of yourself allows the proper action to emerge as a result of your internal balancing. Being clever is not the same as being Alive. You might not become a millionaire politian living life in this way, but you begin to heal yourself and others through all of the modalities in which you interact with people. This is the secret of alchemy, you turn every action, every experience of life into "gold."

Government and the need to win.

People have argued throughout history what is the best way to govern a society. On the one hand, people want freedom, liberties and the ability to openly speak their minds with brutal honesty. On the other hand, there is a necessity to have political correctness to maintain order.

Is it not deeply fascinating to you, that as a race we have the intellect to fly to the moon, create atomic bombs and build cities of overwhelming complexity, and yet we cannot, for all of our efforts, bring peace to this issue?

I believe that the system would operate fine, and everybody would be perfectly content and comfortable with it if there was not a "greed" (for lack of a better term) that permeated it.

If each individual's agenda did not abolish their connection to their natural nitche, then every agenda would be connectable. We can have opposing visions and statements but inevitably those abstractions would not conquer our mutual respect for and wish to co-exist with the Earth.

The "greed" occurs in each individual when all they care about are their personal abstractions. They want money, power, control. They want to "win" in one way or another, at contrast to what other people want. Is it possible to achieve your personal agenda (to win) without sacrificing your biological connection to life? If it is, I believe this is the solution to our ongoing political crisis.  Yet it requires every individual involved with our system of order to reawaken their connection to the Earth.

Good souls, bad people

SO many good souls all around, sending them love sending them love. What's a bad person but a person who doesn't fit in to the norm? We're all awkward, aren't we? Just doing our roles as best we can, never perfectly, but close enough. What's up with us that we all get so self-conscious? It's all our culture, isn't it? All of this avoiding eye contact garbage and holding eye contact garbage--techniques and manners of being that are appropriate/non appropriate. my life's a program, so no worries, I have time to dream in my head while I stir the cooking pot. I have time to worry and hope and contemplate and dream if I don't have to pay attention to what I'm doing. Dichotomies, dichotomies. I either have pay my attention to something or not. Usually if I don't have to, I'm somewhat satisfied for a bit. God forbid someone wants my attention. I'll dole it out in small portions, making it seem rare and valuable. I'll pay attention to what I think is important and to what I want. Nothing else matters, right? Aren't I just being descriptive?

On trust

The difference between being peaceful and in turmoil is our ability to trust. When we trust, we can be relaxed and appreciate the good things in life surrounding us. When we do not trust we do all sorts of things to maneuver around and conquer the environment we are in. We cannot trust the things around us that pose a danger; the people who will judge us, the angry parent, the wild rattlesnake, etc.. I have to hoard my trust and only give it to the parts of the world that do not fill me with anxiety.

What do I mean when I write to operate from trust? I mean that we are filling ourselves up with the world around us and letting it in- because we feel at home being a part of our environment. There are no parts of ourselves we need to hold back so we simply let our actions live in dynamic with our wonderful environment harmoniously. I do not cover up or pretend to be indifferent to things that I am not indifferent to. I allow myself to play, enjoy, smile, relax, share, listen and love. When we do not trust we lock ourselves up physically and psychologically. Ever seen a professional boxing match? The opponents do not trust each other, so they shrivel up in a "turtle posture" and try and punch through each other's shells. We do the same thing psychologically, of course. We tighten up and throw up our homeland security (I stole this from Sam) and begin to grapple with anything that threatens us- and of course this consumes our attention. We give exclusive focus to the objects that we fear are manipulating us. Thus, in our society where we are always surrounded by social and psychological dangers, we only give up our defenses and give our trust out to those things that are safe. We release into television, computers, video games, comfortable social dynamics, pizza, cigarettes and alcohol. These things give us the "high" of being able to trust- which is why we naturally become addicted to them. These things are conveniently placed around us by our society and are given to us so that we can have "easy trust"- that is, trust that we do not have to work for. Thus we are heavily brainwashed through all of these "channels" that society operates- because our trust is obvious, predictable, and steerable.

When one recognizes that their entire life is ruled by addiction- to things that they trust (i.e. does not pose a threat)- it is easy to become depressed. Yet it does not necessarily mean one has to give up the things that they enjoy. One becomes "addicted" to new healthy things like tai chi and yoga. One begins a long, courageous and powerful journey of leaving his/her secure comfortable life behind and discovering whether he/she can live within trust. 

If we become more powerful internally and our learned concerns no longer have the power to subdue our natural trust, then we naturally give up the powers of addiction over us. We become unshakable; we can meet the world with trust and not be consumed by fear. We cannot be manipulated because we have psychologically been freed of the violent cycle of manipulation. Thus there is no end to our re-found ability to trust. We simply trust in the nature of everything, and that psychologically connects us to everything around ourselves. This kind of relationship with the world brings true understanding, and we have no fear of anything that we deeply understands the nature of. 

Every Experience Lived is a Drug: summary and excerpt

Every Experience Lived is a Drug

Primordial medicine for unbridling the ageless dance of Spirit

By Stefan Trilling

Summary: Trilling shares how we can change our relationship to the world around us to live life powerfully and with a heart full of wonder. This book offers insights into various modalities of healing, ancient secrets of restoring and revitalizing connections to the world around oneself, and how to replace one’s unhealthy addictions with reawakened creativity. At the end of the book, Trilling offers detailed instructions on how to preform sacred psychedelic ceremonies (with or without the use of a drug) as a modality for reconnecting to the earth and to one’s True Home.

Excerpt:

Every action in life is a psychedelic drug. When we consume food, we are taking in a certain energy that affects the overall relationship of all of our body’s structures. If we eat junk food, we drain the cells of our energy and release neurotransmitters that depress or hyper-wire the somatic nervous system. If we eat food that balances our body, our physical and psychological health profit. The very air we breathe in every moment and the quality of our breathing greatly effects the way the nerve impulses in our body operate.

There is no action or non-action that occurs that does not change who we are. As life continues, the particles of our beings are interacting in quadrillions of different complex ways, continually altering the physical world. To live from the perspective of this ever-changing continuality, and not merely from the ideas of the mind, is living in Real Time. Non-real time is made up. The numbers of a clock are a mere human abstraction. Yet, we live our psychological lives within this abstraction. We predict plan and strategize our way through life, and all of this is based on our idea of time. We live this world in a linear, mechanical and predictable mode of time. Our psyches reflect that, because we abstract the world around us in the same way that we abstract time. The practice of seeing things in Real Time allows for us to maintain our presence in our lives, because we are directly experiencing the flow of events as they occur. We are not locked up in ideas about the past and the future, because we are concerned with Real Time, what is occurring within this moment. It is living within the relationships occurring in every moment of our experience that creates the beneficial, mind-expanding effects of the Drug of Life.