On thriving
Everything that distinguishes the dominant culture is based on survival mode. That is, our lives as abiding citizens of the dominant culture are driven by a survival urge, not a pleasure-based urge.
That can be observed in everyone as most of our existence is driven by expressions of the basic fight or flight or the more complex freeze, flop or fawn.
These trauma response manifestations may be easier to identify in deprived members of society. You know old school addiction, mental health problems and so on.
However, luxury or the seemingly stable behaviour of oppressors don’t hide for me and many others that they are but manifesting the same reactivity.
For example, folks compulsively accumulating wealth share the constant mini-gasp and contraction that any junkie experiences.
In particular, wealth-hoarding reveals the core fear driving the dominant culture, the fear response consolidated by the promise “I will never go a day without food”¹(regardless of the impact of that fear-driven decision).
This drive to secure food for the morrow isn’t essential for humans.
However, we have been made to believe such drive has always existed for us and has directed our behaviour. This pervasive lie is transmitted by reducing our history to the history of domination, largely exercised by white people in the last few thousand years.
So that fear-driven pattern began to spread like a virus relatively recently and, just like cancer cells, humans infected by this survivalist fear became poorly differentiated and began to reproduce at an abnormally rapid rate.
I speak of cancer cells because I believe seeing humans are cells running amok can facilitate a model to address that survivalist fear.
It is an oversimplification but it works.
A cell receives stuff, sends out stuff, has a boundary and an internal system that digest stuff.
Input. Output. Limits. Processing.
A tiny automaton with seemingly limited states.
If we study humans under the dominant culture as cells, it is easy to notice how, as a whole, they can’t receive nutrition properly, aren’t able to give quality feedback, struggle deeply with presence and boundaries and have a next to nil capacity to process nutrition or adjustments coming from the environment; in the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional arenas
That level of inadequacy gives us the visceral description of the fear running the dominant culture. A fear in which the basic functions of all its participants are severely hampered. (Incidentally, this fear is the fear that ensures “civilisation”.)
More importantly, family, as it’s supported by the dominant culture, is primarily a system to inflict the trauma that perpetuates that aforementioned fear.
That is, the trauma gained by being raised in whatever familiar form held by the dominant culture encodes the major elements that define its white supremacist, ableist, cis-hetero patriarchal, settler colonialist, imperialist, capitalist and anthropocentric field.
Going back to the cell analogy, every one of those defining elements of the dominant culture can be seen as a beam that holds that dominant field inside (and outside) of the human cell, making sure they keep duplicating whilst sick.
Instead of removing those human cells as we would do with cancer cells, we would hope that by dismantling the beams we could tweak those human cells so they begin to operate normally and allocate themselves someplace where they are needed or limit their reproduction or integrate their contents with other cells, etc.
However, tackling each dominant beam separately sounds exhausting, at least for me.
Rather than being linear, we can start by focusing on those four elements that are largely screwed up by the dominant culture: reception, feedback, presence/action, integration/integrity (roughly equivalent to input, output, limits and processing in a cell) — four operations to master in our bodies, minds, spirits and whatever other part we perceive as dysfunctionally operating.
So let’s go for the non-deterministic play.
In my view, it is all about re-learning how to do all those four things, regardless of the method. And all four re-learnt simultaneously so that they can nurture each other and create a field that does not endorse nor support the dominant culture.
Break the beams without aiming to break the beams.
Oh, and I say re-learning because as babies/children we were more than capable of excellence in those four areas. We were like sponges, we also expressed our truth constantly, didn’t check out and digested everything that came our way at a spectacular speed. Everything was done at the edge of our capacity because, simply, we didn’t know any other way to do it.
My preferred method of re-learning is the Erotic Engine, which is a discretisation of thoughts, sensations and emotions that reorganises them in a super simple (and somewhat obvious) way, such that those four basic operating elements of a cell are nourished, one item at a time.
The name Erotic comes from the expanded definition of the Erotic given by Audre Lorde, in which an intense level of pleasure, delight and enjoyment isn’t confined solely to the sexual arena.
In my case, the outcome of having a solid Erotic Engine practice has been becoming more proficient at gently re-directing my consciousness and actions to better receive and give away nurturing stuff, whilst also being more able to process non-nurturing stuff and either discard it or convert it into nourishment.
Alchemy, in one word.
So there you have it, what a cancer-like human cell misses is remembering how to perform alchemy and have pleasure in the process.
- I heard that expression first from the lips of Bro. Dr. Heru Khuti.
Further reading on trauma and paradoxes, psychology and the dominant culture, applied Erotic Engine.
