People keep saying, “I hope 2022 is better than the last two years.” Usually, they’re talking about “big picture” issues. News headlines stuff. And yes, of course, I, too, hope 2022 will be better in those macrocosm ways.

In the meantime, though, maybe we can do more than just “wait” and “hope” for good things to happen “out there in the world community.” Maybe we can create our own healthier community. And maybe if we do create our own healthier community, that healthiness can spread out, like the proverbial ripples spreading out in a pond. The microcosm affecting the macrocosm. Holograms. Butterfly wings causing tsunamis and all of that.

What comes to mind, specifically, when I hear people (including me) express their hopes, wishes, and prayers for a better 2022, is this chunk of Adi Da’s teaching. 

“Instead of waiting for action from “sources” out in the world somewhere – government sources, media sources, inter-planetary sources, mystical sources, or whatever it is that you wait for all the time – you must, yourself, become involved in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily human society.”

Adi Da’s vision for cooperative community is not idealistic. That’s one of the things I adore about it. It is not hippie communalism. This is especially good news for me, because I am an old-school, die-hard punk rocker at heart. Everybody knows punk rockers are both legally and cosmologically required to hate the ways of hippies. In Adi Da’s teaching, community is a discipline. And the purpose of it is ego-transcendence – not Utopia. Ego-transcendence is hard, messy, and just generally a royal pain in the ass (though not nearly as much of a pain in the ass as non-ego-transcendence). 

When taken on as a serious spiritual discipline, real community requires truckloads of tolerance, cooperation, self-responsibility, creativity, pliancy, and human maturity. It requires us to consistently show up in daily life with strong relational and participatory energy. It requires us to live in the disposition of service. I am woefully unskilled at these things.

When, long ago, I lived in a Zen household, I grew to hate one of my roommates. He’d eat his Corn Flakes or pass the salt or hang up his coat in this geologically slow way. To him, that meant he was being all mindful and “Zenny.” I found it pretentious, and it made me crazy. 

Another roommate, the woman who owned the house, became obsessed with getting me to dust this little Buddha statue every day. I, therefore, became obsessed with not dusting the little Buddha statue, ever.

A third roommate, a guy who mercifully only lived in the house for a few months, was into the Ayurvedic practice of Amroli – drinking one’s own urine. This would be fine, but he was also an itinerant Zen nomad. He didn’t own anything. That meant that he used my frigging coffee cups to drink his pee. They would always have this tell-tale sheen on the bottom, almost rainbowy, like oil in a puddle. I would proceed to throw these coffee cups straight into the garbage, an act of pure Seinfeld-ness.

My point is, in this household, none of us approached living together as a counter-egoic practice. It never even occurred to us. And here’s the thing. If we don’t engage intimate, human-scale community as a discipline of self-transcendence, we will inevitably duplicate the exact same ego-politics that create the daily headlines. The blithe presumption that I won’t duplicate the same craziness I see “out there in the world at large” – just because, y’know, I’m such a good person – is wildly naïve and arrogant. 

Sam gets all advicey

Maybe you’re lucky enough to already have an intimate circle of good friends. If so, maybe you’d find it interesting to engage with them as a practice of self-transcendence, if you don’t already. Here are three ways you could play with that. 

1) When you’re with the people in your life, see how much “free, available energy and attention” you can manifest. See how fully engaged you can be with them, energetically, emotionally. 

For me, Adi Da’s phrase “free energy and attention” conveys more than the idea of merely “being fully present” with someone. Whenever I try to just “be present” with a person I tend to make some sort of effort with my head, with my pointy mental attention. Also, “being present” has, in my mind, a placid, quietistic vibe. 

Adi Da’s Wisdom on having “free energy and attention” requires me to take responsibility for my own emotional-energetic-somatic contraction and to release it in feeling-Remembrance of the Heart. This disposes me toward a rounder, juicier, livelier, fuller presence – one that both gives and receives love or life-force; one that risks and communicates any and all emotions; one that plays, improvises, and responds, beyond my usual comfort levels. For me this is an excellent discipline. 

2) Be vulnerable. Adi Da Once said that, although the phrase “come out of the closet” means publicly revealing one’s homosexuality, there is a very real sense in which all of us must come out of the closet – with our hidden wounds, fears, and secret insecurities. This too can be excellent ego-transcending practice, while simultaneously facilitating connection, trust, intimacy, empathy, and tolerance. 

Groovily enough, this kind of vulnerability or coming out of the closet doesn’t always have to be done with words. It can be an unarmored disposition you manifest in your way of being, a soft openness in your presence, in your face, in your eyes, in your body language, and in your tone of voice (curious note: chronic “over-sharers” rarely show any of these non-verbal signs of actual, whole-person vulnerability).

A couple years ago I was on a healing arts retreat in my spiritual practice and I got partnered up with a man who radiated this kind of profound vulnerability simply through his presence. And what struck me the most about it, about him, is how much deep, mountainous strength this gentle presence conveyed. Paradox-o’-rama. 

3) The asana of service. Here we’re not talking about service in that codependent, people pleasey way, because in the codependent, people pleasey way, the focus is actually always on oneself, on one’s own anxiety to be approved of, to be liked, to not displease. There’s also often rage lurking right beneath the surface of most people pleasers. It’s exhausting. 

But in the real disposition of service, we forget ourselves. Real service energizes us. As Adi Da once said to a devotee, if it’s real service there’s a glow all over your body, your face is rosy and bright. All of which is majorly contra the ego. 

If you’re not lucky enough to already have a close circle of intimate friends, you could do what I’m starting to do (because in recent years no less than five of my old dear friends have moved out of state; a couple others have simply grown in very different directions, meaning they’re both really into weed and seething darkly about politics, neither of which are my thing). That is to put some actual time and work into meeting new people – Meet Up gatherings, classes, workshops, 12-step meetings, whatever. And then play with those three counter-egoic relational disciplines with the new people you meet.  

Here, by the way, is a fuller excerpt, from which I took that chunk above:

“For the usual person, politics is merely a matter of listening to the “news” every night. Politics in this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch) is either a childish or an adolescent reaction to the fact of being controlled by the “news” of the world and by the abstract, all-controlling politics of the State. One individual plays the “system”, and the other is a revolutionary. The child buys the “system” and expects it to work, and the adolescent is a perpetual revolutionary, whose childish expectations were not fulfilled. Both types are merely relating to the world as a parent like “thing” that controls them.

“If you stop listening to (or, otherwise, believing in) the “news”, and if you simply observe what is really going on, you, inevitably, become depressed by the feeling that your life is not under your control. However, “depression” is only a very minimal insight. Obviously, everybody is (both naturally and humanly) controlled. The typical response to the observation of the controlling forces of life is to react by joining a revolution, getting drunk, kicking a couple of bad politicians out of office, having a war, getting “high” on popular illusions, becoming “against” a political “something”, or becoming “for” a political “something” – but reaction is obviously not the way to directly transform real politics. What is needed is to establish a completely different principle of human culture and politics. What is needed is a principle of human culture and politics that is not based on reaction to all the bad “news”. 

“Fundamentally, there is only bad “news” in the ordinary, ego-based, un-Enlightened, chaotic world. Instead of waiting for action from “sources” out in the world somewhere – government sources, media sources, inter-planetary sources, mystical sources, or whatever it is that you wait for all the time – you must, yourself, become involved in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily human society.

“…You can and must create your own politics – in intimate, cooperative association with your fellow human beings…Regardless of the larger politics, or the state of the “news” – the truly human (and humanizing) politics of intimate, cooperative living can (and, indeed, must) be done. And, therefore, the ego-transcending discipline of intimate, cooperative living is the only true “radical” politics – or the only genuine “realpolitik” for ordinary, or truly human, men and women.”   

You could create some instant community (albeit virtual fake cyber community) by – you guessed it – subscribing to this very blog and/or commenting!