Blessed New Year to you.
Following is some writing of Rick’s that has been ‘in the wings’ for some time, that he has given the green light to post here. Today’s piece is the first of four “Gate of Power and the Flame of Life” segments. If memory serves, this material is part of a book that has yet to gel… so perhaps readers of the AoA blog are previewing excerpts from a future volume. The rest will follow in increments. ~ Whitehawk
The Gate of Power and the Flame of Life
I. The Hunger of Wanting
Hunger is so basic, so primal, and so fundamental: it literally moves us into consumption. Hunger is natural, but civilization has made it embarrassing, humiliating even. We are ashamed of our hunger and disguise it through politics, rhetoric, and rationalization. But it remains, underneath as the raw animal that is always active. You can smell him. This is the root, what the tantrics called the mula, and to hold the root in place so that it may flower is indeed the task of culture. But as Freud noted almost a century ago, the process tends to become convoluted. In the name of culture and order we try to crush and pulverize the animal of desire, to live a pretty picture unto death do us part.
It has not worked, it has never worked, and it can never work. This denial of the animal that Nietzsche railed against has taken on new forms through the surreal disembodiments of the media. Whereas Villiers de l’Isle could say “as for living our servants will do that for us,” an entire culture is moving towards abdicating life in the raw, to let our machine made fantasies do it for us. If you can capture and control someone’s desire you not only civilize him or her, you rob them of their wellspring of abundance. For the source of power, is the vital stirring of creation, the tension in the mulch of early spring trying to push through the crusted earth of the past, the truth of death and failure as an intrinsic part of this process. Birth is dreadful as well as awesome. To reclaim vitality, to own the passion of evidence, to feel with the breadth of the air and slope of the mountain, to rush forward like a river, and pull deeply inwards like the sweeping undertow: these are more than poetic similitude’s, this natural power and glory is our heritage, our source, and our destiny. But our faith and indeed our very confidence have become colonized by societies of all kinds. Now, we are taught and told to settle for civility, for survival mediocrity. And it is a huge conspiracy; the banks, insurance companies, supermarkets, news magazines, and the rest, all support the consumer. But the desire of the consumer is no longer one of vital hunger; it has been perverted, channeled into check out lines and video stores, made usable, marketable, but at what price?
It is the careful, loving, and skillful tending to hunger that can take one toward the heart of the wheel. And this is why true hunger, our genuine wanting, is our authentic abundance. It is the sacred ground of conscience, of marshaling the energy to want not just to survive or maintain, but to live more than a simulated life, a life we are meant to live in face of the overwhelming presence of the Almighty, revealed in every moment to the individual.
This abundant hunger is not a theory Read the rest of this entry »
