Kali Yuga Blues
Hey friends,
I hope you are doing dandy. :)
We have a fun week lined up at the Stoa for you!
Sacred Cows, Elephants in the Room, and other Noble Beasts w/ Bonnitta Roy. May 25th @ 11:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
One Nation and All Win Leadership w/ Christopher Life. May 26th @ 1:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Gender, Transition and Discourse w/ Benjamin Boyce. May 26th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
OnlyFans and Raw Sexuality w/ Maybe Gray. May 27th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger. May 27th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Live Players w/ Samo Burja. May 28th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Earth Regeneration w/ Joe Brewer. May 29th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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May 24, 2020
This time it will be alright
It's time to move on
Turn the page
Things going to be different
This time not like the last
This time we will get it
What it
What it feels like
What it feels like
It's just the beginning
This is from the song Kali Yuga Blues from the band Bardo Pond. They were kind enough to let me use their song as the intro music for my podcast. I am glad they did. The gritty energy of this song, with its minimalistic lyrics, and its dark optimism, is something that resonates with me.
In Hinduism, Kali Yuga is the epoch said to be a spiritual dark age, and some say this is the epoch we are currently living in. In response, some radical traditionalists say we need to ride the tiger, while others say it is prudent to double-down on your spiritual practices.
Some aspects of this epoch according to Wikipedia: Common attributes and consequences are spiritual bankruptcy, mindless hedonism, breakdown of all social structure, greed and materialism, unrestricted egotism, afflictions and maladies of mind and body.
I am surrounded by amazing people, who care for me. I have a wife who adores me, and who is extremely beautiful, externally and internally. While I have issues with my parents, like everyone, I am very grateful to have been raised by them, and feel very warm by the fact that they always have my back.
I have friends, lots of friends, and they are good friends as well. They are not the superficial sort of friends, where we instrumentalize each other in some I-It relational dynamic. No. I have brothers, and some sisters as well, who call me out on my bullshit, who put me at the edge of my thinking, and are willing to risk being exhausted by my Coyote ways.
On the surface, you would think I would not feel lonely, but I do. Often. Most times I feel lonely, with brief moments of reprieve. It is a funny sort of loneliness, I have referred to it as an existential loneliness before, and the risk of sounding pretentious, it feels like a primordial loneliness.
My heart sometimes feels like it wants to burst in wildly surprising ways, and I often say I love people. I do care deeply about people, and I am very comfortable crying these days. But do I really feel love, if my lived experience is coated in existential loneliness?
I believe and think I am deserving of love, and I also think I am capable of love. I think it is safe to say I have high self-esteem, and my Stoicism affords me personal sovereignty. There must be something else going on here, and maybe it has to do with the Kali Yuga. The words that want to emerge are these: I am being denied love.
Stoicism does not encourage the victim mentality, even if you are a victim, so I do not want to claim victimhood. This traumacene we are in, and our maladaptive relationships which spawned from it, might have something to do with this feeling of denial. Or maybe it is those motherfucking sociopaths, and the Game A world they made, with their trickle-down ethics.
Maybe I am being overtly dramatic right now, with some Stoic emo shit. My sense is that the right move is to get into the right relationship with this existential loneliness, and this probably means I must stop seeking social validation, regardless of how well it is masked with charming authenticity. It also means stop chasing love stories, and the ersatz beauty they offer.
I am watching The Last Dance documentary series, which is about Michael Jordan’s career with the Bulls. Like other men in their mid-30s, Michael Jordan was an absolute hero for me when I was a kid. We all wanted to be like Mike. But as this documentary series shows, being like Mike means being a hypercompetitive beast who has an insatiable desire to dominate.
When they were talking about Jordan's youth, they talked about how he was desperate for his father's love, and was violently competing with his older brother for it, who his father seemed to favor at the time. The documentary implied that this might have been the origins of the psychological motivation for his ferocious competitive drive. Could the denial of love propel one to become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, competitor in sports history?
As expressed in other entries, I deeply desire to dominate, and be dominant. To win, and be a winner. To receive your love, and be loved. A part of me does not want to give you a choice in the matter. But I know there is no love without choice, and engineering a choiceless love is not going to create a beautiful world, and this man wants a beautiful world.
A story is emerging that my spiritual hustle these days is related to all of this. I do not want to publish this entry. It feels too vulnerable. I feel too seen, and this makes me want to cry, and I am beginning to cry right now. I am crying without a guarantee that you will love these tears.
I am surprised. Doing this feels beautiful.
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