December 3, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
One of my intentions, in writing these letters, is to leave bread crumbs on the process of self-discovery. I’ve read a lot of books in the “self-help” genre, offering tools or advice or frameworks one might use to achieve one’s goals. One thing I’ve noticed: books tend to give you a finished product or framework. But the authors often miss key details. One common mistake: failure to recognize one’s genius. Self-help books often focus on the problems the author faced, glossing over the tedium others might experience but for the author’s specific genius. These books are invaluable if your problem happens to match the author’s, but less useful otherwise. Self-help books take the Moses approach, where the author is coming down from the mountaintop carrying the stone tablets of wisdom for the reader to consume and follow. If only life were so simple.
But the bigger problem with self-help books is that the authors often try to “save” the reader from the struggle they, the author, faced in learning the hard lessons imparted within the book. What the authors fail to recognize: the struggle is the path. I’ve come to think of life as a video game we ourselves have designed cosmically. The game we designed is just hard enough to keep us challenged, but not so hard as to overwhelm us. Each level in the game offers us the chance to learn and grow in specific ways: if we accept the opportunity, we can grow and advance to the next level. If we decline to learn the lessons life offers, we get to repeat that level in the game. Sometimes we get stuck on a certain level, experiencing the same inconvenience over and over until we learn the available lesson (think of recurring arguments with a loved one, or recurring work frustrations). Also like a video game: sometimes the tools we need are hidden in plain sight, if only we could surrender our stubborn insistence on solving the level our way and open ourselves to the gifts available to us.
Thus, part of writing these letters has been to give you my real-time experiences, taking away my temptation to edit seemingly unimportant details retrospectively. You can decide what details are important and unimportant, and perhaps even discover the importance of different writings evolve as your life circumstances change. Whatever your experience, I at least hope to give you the unvarnished view of my journey, so that you have some breadcrumbs to follow (or not) as you see fit.
On offshoot of this approach has been to try to connect my spiritual and logical pursuits. Said differently: generally, I’ve tried to use logic to explain myself in these letters, even when my experiences were more intuitive or spiritual. I’ve used this approach not just in my letters but also in my approach to everyday life and interaction. Truth be told, I think I’m coming to the end of that element of the journey. Logic remains of value, and I very much expect to continue to use logic. But I’m coming to accept that, while I believe everyone has a spiritual dimension, each individual gets to choose how they weight their spiritual and logical sides (and that those weightings can change over time, even from moment to moment). To the degree I have a spiritual insight, attempting to convince others using logic is, I find, a relatively fruitless exercise. If the intuition connects, great! If not, that’s fine too. Not all insights are meant for all people. At an individual level, not all insights are meant for the current moment; seeds can be planted in order to bloom later.
Partly I offer this preamble by way of explaining why I anticipate the tone of these letters to evolve going forward. I’ve struggled a bit trying to figure out how to write about some of my experiences over the last year or so, and am realizing that I’m stuck writing in an outdated voice. I’m not entirely sure what the new ‘voice’ will be, only that I intend to release some my expectations for how I share with you going forward.
Throat clearing done, let’s go.
You should be familiar with he yin and yang symbol, and the concepts of yin and yang more broadly. Yang (the light half of the circle) associates with masculinity, positivity, activity, independence, order, creation, and even life; Yin (the dark half of the circle) associates with femininity, negativity, passivity, dependence, chaos, destruction, and death. Look at the list again and observe what associations you have:
- Light, positive, active, independent, orderly, creative, life-giving.
- Dark, negative, passive, dependent, chaotic, destructive, deadly.
As I write, American culture (and I think Western culture more broadly) unconsciously treats Yang characteristics as “good” and Yin characteristics as “bad”. By extension, I think we tend to unconsciously associate masculinity with “good” and femininity as “bad”. According to Chinese tradition, yin and yang are meant to exist in balance. Currently I sense a rise of feminine energy in Western culture (something I discussed in a previous letter). My perception is that women, in whom the feminine energy rises disproportionately, don’t know what to do with this energy. Over millennia of promoting masculine energy, we built infrastructure meant to reinforce it. I can read thousands of biographies dedicated to men, which helps me understand how to channel and direct my masculinity. Women have no such luxury: we don’t have nearly the library of feminine heroes. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, women are increasingly acting like men, with increasing aggression in forums ranging from academia to journalism to social media, demanding equal outcomes in the workforce, politics, and the social hierarchy more broadly. I mean this not as a value judgment (e.g. I am not judging whether this is a “good” of “bad” development), just observing. In a culture that treats masculine energy as good and feminine energy as bad, we should probably expect a rise in feminine energy to get channeled in traditionally masculine ways, albeit clumsily.
I recently read that agriculture was discovered/developed in several different parts of the world around the same time. A group of academics hypothesized, and found, that the earth’s temperatures became more unpredictable around that time, perhaps making food less reliable and encouraging the development of agriculture. To me, this sounds like the story of Adam and Eve, when humanity stopped living in harmony with its environment and attempted to take control of our own destiny, thus setting off the tension we feel between our spiritual and logical selves. The spiritual self yearns for harmony with creation and the universe, while the logical self wants to remain in control (or at least the illusion of control).
Interestingly, the development of agriculture set off a bit of an arms race. Harvesting encouraged the creation of storage for crops. Storing food encouraged theft or pilferage (why cultivate and store crops if one can more easily take from others?), which encouraged the creation of security apparatuses like armies and fortresses to protect the land from would-be raiders. Note that building storage, stealing from others, and creating armies are all expressions of masculine energy. Thus, the development of agriculture set off something of a feedback loop promoting masculine energy. This, I think, is what people ultimately mean when they rail against “the patriarchy”: a long-standing tradition of the promotion of masculine values, such that they become so embedded in cultural norms as to become almost invisible.
And so now we see the rise of feminine energy, attacking social norms and institutions, sowing chaos, and paving the way for death and decay. Our society doesn’t like destruction, chaos, and death, so we’re fighting the changes. Neither men nor women know how to adapt to this changing balance of energy.
My coach taught me that feminine energy looks for boundaries. When masculine energy can set a firm container capable of holding feminine energy, that feminine energy can then melt into the release of energy that is death or surrender. I found this to be true, even within my own being: in the St Ignatius exercises I participated in last year, I found myself creating a safe space where I could then accept vulnerability and uncertainty, and surrender those aspects of myself that were ready to die. From that place of death (or surrender), rebirth is possible. I notice a similar thing when I stretch: my muscles instinctively resist an uncomfortable stretch, but when they sense safety the tight muscles begin to release. The release isn’t instant or painless, but comes in waves of release and tension.
As I’ve said before, I believe we’re in an era of death. Thus the rise of femininity. I don’t know what will die. In my experience, the process of surrender is inherently uncertain (or chaotic). One cannot know until the process begins what will die and, from there, what will emerge. But the process cannot begin until firm boundaries are set, containing but also protecting the feminine energy. As individuals but also society, we are invited to set boundaries such that we can descend into chaos securely. My sense is we have a tremendous amount of pain to release in order that we might jump into a new era spiritually, economically, and politically. I think the world we move into will look dramatically different from the world we inhabit today, and I suspect the pace of change will be dizzying. I do believe, with some confidence, changes are inevitable, and resistance will only result in suffering (indeed, while discomfort and pain are sometimes unavoidable, I am coming to believe suffering is invariably created by resistance to what is).
I experienced a visual recently. Unlike past visions, this occurred during normal consciousness (e.g. neither dreaming nor meditating). I envisioned God coming in the form of a storm. We (individually and collectively) will be tempted to retreat into the castles we’ve built. These castles are the false gods we worship (these might include our education system, media, political parties, religious dogma, and potentially even our political and economic systems – e.g. the United States of America, capitalism, socialism, and Marxism). Our instinct will tempt us to descend into the deepest recesses of the castle, and maybe even chain ourselves down in an effort to sense security. But when God’s storm razes and floods the castle, we will find ourselves trapped in a hell of our own making.
The alternative is not entirely clear: are we to build a boat? A plane? Or are we to swim? Or fly? I do think we are invited out to face the storm, and to trust we will know what to do at the appropriate time. I believe the coming storm is meant to clear out those false gods that no longer serve us and are meant to die. We can retreat into them, or we can release the underlying pain that caused us to build them in the first place. One choice will trap us in a hell of our own making. The other choice will release us from suffering and carry us into a new era unburdened. Unimaginably better days lie on the other side of the storm, if only we allow the storm to blow away the detritus that cannot make the journey with us.
I feel more uncertainty now than perhaps at any point in my life. The uncertainty unnerves me, but the storm comes regardless. All I can do is prepare myself, and attempt to prepare the two of you (and anyone else interested in making the journey).
I’ve previously discussed my recurring dream of being precariously stuck at great heights. In one relatively recent dream, I was floating (for the first time, I wasn’t even perched on something) above the Bay Area (basically at the vantage point of the weather reports on local news). I assumed I was falling, then realized I could float. I wondered what to do, and heard a telepathic message: “Lift it up”. I’m not entirely sure what that meant; I do sense a calling to stay and do my work here in the Bay Area (I’m often tempted to leave, discouraged by the cost of living and poor governance). In another dream, I was again floating, this time above a nondescript area. Wondering what to do, I first heard the message “Fly” before another, “And untie yourself”. I looked down to see a rope tied around my ankle, tethering me to the ground hundreds of feet below. I’ve heard about this stage in a spiritual journey, wherein one builds a bridge from the old world to the new, then dismantles the bridge behind.
In the latest manifestations of these dreams, I am not the one perched precariously. You are. I am terrified of watching the two of you fall. My sense, though it scares me to even articulate it, is that I am being invited to teach you both the tools you need to make the journey for yourselves. Wish me luck?
I love you both, more than you will ever know.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 