brianburke.net

It has become apparent to me in the last year, as my life has realigned with a dedication to service, that it’s important to define for myself what I mean by service. The reason this is important is that I have spent so much of my life talking about service and what serves without actually doing it, because my ego has been hard to move out of the way. When I do this, it usually looks like a “holier than thou” attitude toward my fellow human, in which I’m chastising, judging or trying to control because I “know better” and I’m just going to shed the light for everyone else from my soapbox.

So one thing I’ve learned, in my practice, is that true service involves the dissolution of ego and honoring of the mysteries of my soul. I used to think that letting go of ego concerns would mean that I never spoke about myself or that I was always concerned with helping others and not being “needy” myself. However, what I’ve found is a little bit the opposite; when I feel my ego is truly out of the way, I can simply own my own experience without being attached to it, and allow others to have their own experience of the world, without judging or seeking to control. So it looks like, “X is just my experience, what is yours?” And once we have both shared that, it’s ok to just let it sit there and breathe! Like, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, shared with integrity, and then… (big drum roll)… OK! Now to do the dishes,” instead of, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, but wait, they’re different! We believe in different things! We have different preferences! Oh no!” I played that game for long enough, going around the world seeking only those people who have “things in common” with me; and actually, “things in common” with what my ego had decided it wanted to look like to the world, which is where the holier than thou originates from.

And I have compassion for myself around having done that and still doing it from time to time, because it comes from deep wounding. And at times it has felt like all my little wounded self wants is to feel connection with people, to feel seen and heard, to feel love and belonging. And I used to think that receiving love and belonging meant being around people with similar “goals” and “interests” and “values,” and being around people that agreed with me all the time. O how much suffering this brought me, and relational confusion when I tried to shape everyone into what I wanted them to be, which was like me!

I find the world very boring when everyone agrees all the time; it’s like the equivalent of the crops for which we have ruined the diversity of the gene pool through genetic modification. We are all incredibly diverse, within our own individual souls! but we often walk around like we could just reduce ourselves to some very limited, efficient, predictable set of labels. And then we actually pretend to “get to know each other” that way! “Ooh, you like sustainability? Me too! Let’s be friends.” And I say yes to that as a starting point, but yes even more so to starting points of disagreement and respect, and I say an absolute no to that as an endpoint instead of going deeper. I want to feel what is behind someone’s eyes when I look into them, and I want to know how clear and present those eyes are. You can see in someone’s eyes and hear in someone’s tone of voice if they have an ego agenda, and ego agenda is the anti-service. Let’s start the movement to stop genetically modifying our souls to be boring and understandable! Heirloom humans, those are the kind I like.

What I’ve come to discover is that the people who end up being closest to me, the people that make me feel the most seen and heard, the people who heal me, are the ones who simply see what I am and love it anyway. And I say “anyway” because I make mistakes, and I’m not perfect, and sometimes I hurt people, or do something irresponsible, and I’m not Buddha, and yet I am worthy of love because I exist, just like everything else. Kahlil Gibran says, “Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.” Who am I to deny food to the hungry, even if I am the hungry, if I have some to give? And we all have some to give, always.

In this vein, I know that to the degree I show myself to the world, to that same degree I can accept love back from it. So I’ve decided, as a practice, to avoid limiting the expression of my truest self with dogmatic buzzwords masquerading as “values” and “beliefs.” Rather, I know that in order to truly serve, I must listen deeply, and listen deeply within the moment, which is all that exists. When I do that, my “values” show up in my eyes, in my voice, in my actions, in my body, in my words. And the Spirit guides them, and the wisdom of my ancestors deep within my bones guides them, and they don’t need or want buzzwords. At the end of the day, when we lay our individual heads on the pillow, the voice of our conscience is the way we answer to the gods and the universe, not to each other’s opinions.

So to remind myself of these things, needing as I am of a practice, by virtue of my human fallibilities, this little motto came to me the other day:
Attend your own existence as if every moment you spend with the truth of the present is as precious clean water you feed to the ever-new growth that is forever becoming your life’s masterpiece, without your planning. The gift is in the watering, which we do every time we soulfully accept Truth’s invitation, and show up fully to its eternal dance, with no expectations but to listen, and no agenda but to dance according to what we hear. The masterpiece that is yourself grows like a tree, which you will notice does not grow in a straight line towards a goal, an endpoint. Rather, its growth only involves exposing more and more of itself to the sun and the moon, and drinking in more and more of the ever-abundant Spirit in the ether. Be as the tall tree and do not act from hollow duty, but rather, as the poet says, “give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.”

I think the shadow only becomes “shadow” if parts of the soul are suppressed and un-expressed. For whatever reason, historical or other, there are certain qualities of human nature that have gotten negative connotations, i.e. anger, sexual urges, childishness, selfishness, etc. The curious thing to me is that the same exact attributes can and often do have completely different connotations in different contexts. For example, someone may consistently get taken advantage of by other people, and in that case it would be wise for that person to cultivate some more selfishness, because it only does harm to be taken advantage of. On the other hand, someone who is always thinking of themselves and how they can personally benefit, at the expense of the group, would probably be chastised for being too selfish. Therefore, we cannot simply state that selfishness, or any other quality for that matter, is inherently good or bad and leave it at that; it depends on the context.
However, we have this tendency to somehow decide which qualities are good and which qualities are bad, and then identify ourselves with labels accordingly, using blanket statements such as, “I am not a selfish person.” We convince ourselves that the qualities in the “bad” category have the capacity to do harm, so we lock them up out of fear, but in that locking we may very well foster ignorance, more fear, lack of connection, lack of intimacy, underachievement, emotional confusion and pain, etc., and all of these can be just as harmful, if only not as immediately or as discernibly.
Take for example the common practice, as mentioned above, of applying blanket labels to ourselves such as “introvert” or “extrovert,” or “street smart” or “book smart,” etc. The reality is that we all have extroversion and introversion, book smarts and street smarts, etc., living within us all the time, even though one or the other may or may not have been predominantly expressed up until this point in our lives. The question that keeps recurring to me is: why is it necessary to pick and choose what we are among these arbitrary and, frankly, very loosely defined polar opposites? What good does it do to identify oneself as an introvert rather than an extrovert? I realize how often in my life I have been self-enslaved by these conceptual notions of what or who I am, and I don’t think it has done me any good at all. Rather, it has limited me from honoring and nurturing parts of myself that have the potential to flourish and give to the world, and I’m tired of limiting my own potential for the false security of an identity made of arbitrary labels (which also, by way of their loose colloquial definitions, lead to all kinds of painful and frustrating miscommunications on a regular basis).
It is the soul’s very nature to seek expression, often magical and unpredictable expression, and this need of the soul is so strong that it will happen whether we want it to or not. Every part of the soul will see itself expressed; the choice we all have is whether or not we will be conscious of that expression, in all the multitudinous ways it can occur. When we lock away all the qualities of ourselves that we think are bad or harmful we create the shadow, and the more we try to suppress the potential that we have those qualities, the more they control us unconsciously, the more they cause us to judge and hurt others, and the more they make us suffer. I believe this locking up happens every time we deny a part of ourselves the mere possibility of being expressed.
People get scared because they think that once they open the door to the expression of what has been shadow, there is no telling what craziness will ensue. For example, someone who has suppressed the sexual part of themselves may be scared to let it be expressed because they would do something against their value system. But in order to make a true choice about something, I think permission has to be given to the possibility of both options. In other words, someone with a formerly suppressed sexual urge could do a lot of self-liberating just by granting permission to the idea of doing something sexual, without necessarily fulfilling the urge in actions. Having given permission to that possibility, they have allowed that part of themselves, of their soul, the part that is sexual, a voice and a seat at the table, even if it wasn’t acted upon. And it’s such a more gentle choice at that point to not act upon it, rather than white-knuckling on a just-say-no mentality when the urge is chomping at the bit. If we can do that on a regular basis, then we can start to really feel ownership over our lives, because we are making true choices in every moment. When we don’t do this, and instead deny and deny and deny certain parts of our soul, that is when we get addictions and various other behaviors that appear “deviant,” such as the very conservative senator who has long opposed gay marriage and considered homosexuality a sin, only to be caught having homosexual sex outside of marriage while trying to keep it a secret. All the soul wants is expression, even if that means simple acknowledgment in the theater of your own mind.
In my own experience of the world, I think that human growth is possible to the extent that we can give the entirety of our soul a voice, and I believe this is what is meant by “integrating the shadow.” This is what makes the greatest artists the greatest. The greatest artists, poets, athletes, people do not accept self-imposed limits of what they are “supposed” to be like or look like or act like. They only respond to the call of the moment and the truth and let it take them where it will, without fear or worry about what people will think or how they will be judged. No one became one of the greatest by being afraid to do something that no one had done before; it is precisely because they are willing to open and offer their own uniqueness to the Muse and let it guide them into truly new territory that they are great. And the reason they can do this is that they have transcended the arbitrary and obeyed the call of the infinite.
So in a way, when I say “God” or “The Infinite,” I refer to that which simply is, despite the fact that we may or may not want it to be so. And I say YES it is a mystery, but that doesn’t mean we can’t know it, it just means we can’t speak it in literal English. We can speak it in metaphor and in feeling, and we can express it in our art and our poetry and our movements and in so many other avenues besides the literal one.
To attach our understanding of life to the literal and the arbitrary is to attach ourselves to suffering. Inevitably the magic of the moment will always call our arbitrary rigid expectations into question, and we can always feel it, no matter how numb we’ve become or how unconscious we are of it. That we can always feel it is why we can still suffer at all, for just as the soul seeks expression, so does the truth, and when it is denied confusion and pain will ensue, because the truth is still there in the room, despite the denial. So just as the enlightenment of the gurus and the legends involves transcendence of the arbitrary and alignment with the infinite, so it involves a movement from the literal to the metaphorical realm. Prayer and Myth. These are the master talents of the soul, and the soul has known how to do these things since before we were born, when it still lived unencumbered in the land of pure is, never having known the concept of should. If only we can move our rigid egos out of the way, the soul will always know what to do, and will always be at home in the truth.

Reflecting on a very enthusiastic conversation about vision quest from last night, a thought occurred to me about the vision quest process, and how it has worked through me. One of the things I love most about vision quest, and especially rites of passage, is an idea I heard from one of my guides, Will Scott at the School of Lost Borders. It goes something like this: when we go to the land and make a claim we are courageously opening a big new crack in ourselves that the universe will do its best to fill in during incorporation. In essence, the universe wants to “test its new toy,” kick the tires and see if the person will literally in-corp-orate what they went to claim on the land, out in the world at large.
I am realizing now that before I quested for manhood this summer, it was as though I had been living inside a self-created cage. This cage was very complex, and mostly built from all kinds of different limiting beliefs and expectations I had about myself and my life, like that I wanted to “reach” a certain level of enlightenment as if it was a pot of gold I could attain, or that I wanted to meet a completely perfect woman and have a completely perfect relationship with no problems at all, or that I believed life could just be either good or bad, et cetera. And every time life reminded me, by way of the present moment, that those rigid expectations would never actually come true, because life and the soul is rich and deep and intricate and filled with paradox and mystery, NOT certainty (the only certainty being that I will die); every time those reminders came I would become afraid and anxious, because my little cage was built from this utopian vision of what my life SHOULD be. These reminders came often (thank god) and I spent most of my time being anxious and afraid to be who I actually was, instead trying to be the image of the “good” person I had invented. The cage held me back from embodying myself in the present moment almost everywhere I went. And I think it was easy for the people around me to notice when this was happening, because I would appear to be somewhere far off. And it was true, my mind was far off, haplessly daydreaming of all the ways that someday my life would be perfect, the telltale condition of an over-seeker. And the whole time I was missing the incredible wonderment of the moment that was right in front of me the whole time, an opportunity for freedom that was mine if only I could open myself enough to fall in love with it.
Well, somehow, before I realized all these things, even while all of this self-caging was still happening below my consciousness, something deep in my soul in the most ancient part of my bones knew I wasn’t ok with that kind of life anymore. That frankly I would die if I didn’t do something about it. That the rampant fear and anxiety was making a mockery of my own divinity, slowly squeezing all the life out of my potential, my gifts, the possibility of what my life could become, directing me to hopelessly fixate on what it SHOULD become. And so, even amidst the cacophonous din of the ten thousand voices in my head, I somehow heard the roaring of the sacred river in the distance, and it was too loud and too strong for me to say anything but yes in response. I think it was ultimately the seeker in me that led me there, fitting that the same part of me that put me in prison would eventually be the only one that could lead me out.
The quest taught me that there is no should, there is only is. Joseph Campbell said “We have to be willing to give up the lives we’ve planned for ourselves in order to experience the lives that are waiting for us.” This has been the story of my quest. So I have a new image now of how this story worked and is still working itself, and it looks like this: my rite of passage, my initiation in front of the council of all beings, opened the door of that cage and invited me to step outside. Invited me to step out of the frail “certainties” of my ego cage and into the sonorous chambers of my cavernous soul. It has felt scary at times, for despite the cage’s limitations, it was at least familiar, and at least at first, the outside of the cage was not. Nevertheless, the quest has given me permission and freedom to live in the not knowing, and feel alive and in love being myself in the world. And frankly, the felt experience of divinity that is available in the soul space is as familiar to the most ancient dusty reaches of me as anything.
It is as if I poured myself a new mold on the quest, and the task of my incorporation has been and continues to be to fill in that mold with as much of myself as I can in every moment, for myself for my people. I have thus, in this initiation, learned a new definition of the very north shield concept of “showing up”: Being Myself. And I can only ever call anyone else out to do the same. This is one of the great works of our generation and our times: to reject that which has told us to be afraid of being ourselves, and retake our love for ourselves and for one another, and for all of creation. This is liberation, and…
This is a CELEBRATION!

Let this be a theme song for our courageous march into the present, individuals united as one for the love of life.