Source-Tissue Festoon

Friction is the same thing as traction

1. There are few things of less interest to me than what people call “enlightenment”, and the motivations that cluster around it.

2. Knots bind us; they also anchor us. Friction is the same thing as traction. It’s admirable to untie bad knots and smooth out bad friction, but going beyond that into fantasies of zero knots and zero friction is misguided.

3. We have many names for the Tao, Brahman, Source-Tissue, God, Existence-Fabric, the Ground of Being we are all emergent from — I’ll go with Source-Tissue for now.

4. The Source-Tissue is whole, undivided, non-dual; it not only underlies everything that is, it is everything that is. One of its favorite activities seems to be decorating itself, texturing itself, artfully tying itself in knots to feel and play and perceive itself. As David Hinton describes it,

   Like art executed here at the very beginning… like existence rustling, decorating itself with lightning and egret and sun, with wavelength festoon, wander-deep confetti, eye-lit celebration.

5. Self-same wholeness and profligate self-decoration — these are both eternal qualities of the Tao.

6. We are all wholly the self-same wholeness of the Source-Tissue, and we are each the wander-deep confetti of its profligate self-decoration.

7. There are times when these festooning reflexes of the Source-Tissue create tangles and snares and unworkable ossified textures. Here are the places where we need to un-knot, to smooth out, to take down the decorations and whitewash the canvas to start again on the palimpsest.

8. But seeking to enact this untangling impulse on the entire Source-Tissue — that’s something beyond heresy, beyond self-destruction, beyond a dick move against the Tao itself.

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1. Specificity is almost by definition one of the roles of an embodied being born of the Source-Tissue.

2. The impulse to transcend the specific, to leave behind the particular self and identify with the fabric itself, is one of the healthy impulses of an embodied creature. —It quickly falls out of balance if it’s not tempered by an impulse to frolic and labor and immerse oneself in the specific, the particularities of individuation.

3. Look at how much energy you spend convincing yourself that transcendence isn’t escapist. That’s one measure of how much your escapism has hijacked the transcendent impulse.

4. Soul-making is essential for our age — the spiritual parts of our culture have been axiomatically transcendence-seeking for a long time. We need a counterbalance that takes joy in the specific without turning into distraction, just like we need a joy in the transcendent that doesn’t turn into escapism.

5. The Source-Tissue is expressing itself as you — with a particular form, a particular personality, a particular mix of strengths and neuroses and hardships and advantages — because it needs to festoon itself with the particular expression you are. As Ortega Y Gasset said,

   Your will is free to realize or not realize the vital design which you ultimately are, but you cannot correct it, change it, abbreviate it, or substitute anything for it. You are indelibly that single personage who must be realized.

6. You are under no obligation to annihilate or see through the self that you are. You are under no obligation to be anything other than the Source-Tissue’s way of festooning itself with the sleek, tragic, friendly, sunburnt or irritable embroidering of the fabric that you are.

7. You are also under no obligation to stay the way you’ve been. The Source-Tissue’s self-decoration is multidimensional and dynamic, it will move you where it wants you, and you can let it teach you to flow with it, or you can resist it and try to tangle it. It’s all on the table, it’s all part of the current.

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1. I feel little kinship with sci-fi fantasies of frictionless futures, where everything is ease and convenience.

2. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of escaping samsara, of no longer having to deal with the friction of existing.

3. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of no-karma, of unwinding all the knots that connect me to the world and other people.

4. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of story-zero, of dissolving all stories I might tell myself about life & world.

5. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of pure mental health, of attaining secure attachment and perfect porous boundaries and zero trauma and every other boon of the View from Nowhere.

6. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of escaping the self-decoration of the Source-Tissue.

7. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of hacking the Source-Tissue. Of seeing the rewards that the Source-Tissue uses to nudge us towards its highest will — rewards like joy, fulfillment, love, purpose, depth; of deciding not to follow those guiding currents, but instead finding backdoors, side-stepping the current and hacking the circuits where joy, fulfillment, love, purpose and depth hold us and guide us.

   1. I imagine an ant who, instead of following the pheromone trails laid down to guide him, simply goes to his room and smells some of the bottled pheromones he worked all summer to collect.

8. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of smoothing out the Source-Tissue once and for all.

9. I feel little kinship with the fantasy of walking behind the scenes, double-checking the Source-Tissue’s work.

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1. I am a specific type of person, a very particular mixture of the Source-Tissue’s materials and dynamics.

2. There’s no need to listen to me any further than you feel my words ringing and texturing the Source-Tissue in you.

3. “I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.” — Blake Crouch, Recursion

4. Balance is fine, but have you considered that you belong to a very specific imbalance/emphasis, which needs desperately to express itself through you?

5. We call this Soul.

6. We call this Calling.

7. We call this the Gods You Belong To.

8. We call this Authenticity, Integrity, Autochthony.

9. We call this the Genius.

10. You call it nothing — you see it in the depths of the mirror, and you coax it into your every thought, word, and action.