Your Highest Self is Your Smallest Self
Hi all, warmest greetings and I truly hope you’re well as you’re reading this. Welcome to episode 2. In this episode I read an essay I wrote about 3 years ago, with the ambition to reinforce a de-platforming of human consciousness that will be imperative going forward. To put it plainly, we’re all people, with our human-thinking brains. But if we are practicing animists, we know that our type of human intelligence and consciousness is only a single speck of interest and beauty in the magnificence of an ever-changing and emoting universe that we are a part of. There are so many intelligences and awarenesses, styles of communication, and languages between other beings, both known scientifically (like how trees work with mycelium) and unknown (our human relationships with constellations, myths and storied deities, yet? What? How? )So we need this awareness, a base acknowledgment of knowing that we don’t know. I discuss healing work, the “spiritual industry” and how maybe Being Human is about doing less than it is about “being better.” Here is that episode. *please note, you will hear a lot of creaking and cracking from the chair I am sitting on. I’ve since replaced this chair at my desk with a less creaky one. But in the context of this episode, just pretend the sounds are of logs and twigs crackling in the fire we’re all gathered round… you know, the one I mentioned in the introductory episode? Or maybe we’re out all together on a hike, and these are sticks snapping underfoot. For now. Thank you for your patience! Episode Script Hi and welcome back to Animist Activist Podcast. It’s me, your host and writer, Bri. Today I’m reading a mildly edited essay I wrote a while back. My goal in sharing this now is that this work may help destabilize a bit of human consciousness hierarchy - sort of set that foundation of thought for the following episodes this season. Because we’re going to be diving right into paradoxical puzzles like notions of invasive species, weeds, and human waste practices in this season.I wrote and published this essay on September 1, 2020. This was to be a few days before I turned 29 years old, and I was having deep experiences of knowing crop up about what it means to occupy the human form. I was making art, vocationally making coffee, and designing a lot of content, zines, and virtual classes surrounding earth-based spiritual practice, grief work and art-as-ritual.I was living in a small duplex in a very small town. This space was surrounded at five points by a breathing pentagram of five mature Oak trees. I hold the number five in great esteem as my life-path number and Oak trees are sacred to my wayback druid ancestors. Each of these trees, especially this time of year, late summer, in the rain and humidity, were populated over their roots by loads of moss beings, as well as the fruiting bodies of several fungi species. Jack-o-Lantern, Indigo Milk, some gorgeous gothic black mushroom I was never able to fully identify, and some others too, in shades of red-brown.Outside the window of my bedroom was a ramshackle house, rather dilapidated and covered in ivy. There was a moldering wood-slat fence woven through with wild blackberry bushes that separated my “yard” from the space in that wild place. There was an old wooden canoe next to the back of the house from where I often heard a regular “bump-in-the-night” that I rather imagined was a possum. And the old outbuilding, also crumbling, was the home of several families, most notably adorable, the groundhog family, who had three babies in the spring season that I lived there.Late at night, always in the ink-deep dark of the evening, I’d be lying in bed and hear a soft low metallic humming sound. It was just persistent enough to disrupt my rest. The discomfort of my inability to place this sound led me out into a midnight walk on more than one occasion searching for the origin of this noise. It sounded like something in between very distant construction noise, the electromagnetic buzz of old telephone wires, and a soft guttural purring that some cats or even birds might make. I wandered dark streets, as the sound moved, maze-like, and in spirals. I believed I was following the sound, but I never located it. It was a will-o-the-whisp, a trickster and something but also nothing.This is the space I occupied. I had one human neighbor, who shared the other side of the duplex. He worked nights and slept days, and we briefly passed one another, a nodded “hello” that marked most timid communication during 2020 in the early Corona times.The fungi people, the possum, the spiders and oak trees, the nothing-sound, were also all my neighbors. The following essay is what came about from this time and place, musings on hierarchy, and being human. It’s also about my personal learning,thateven this skin and bone compilation, with this kind of brain, has its flaws and hang-ups, misguided obsessions, and…that there’s more to this “human- being thing” than just conscious awareness.This essay was edited for sharing via audio, that is, for listening rather than for reading.“Your Highest Self is Your Smallest Self and It’s Not About You”There’s a tendency in the spiritual “industry” to center the human experience. For starters, the most adhered - to religions, currently, are the monotheisms based on a humanoid godhead. In the libraries I frequently visit, the “Self-Help” and “Spirituality” books are often shelved in the same section. Life coaches and gurus make millions on “helping you to be the best version of yourself.”Concepts of the Higher Self are a necessary mythos. And I don’t mean Myth as a synonym for “fake, false, untrue.” I consider myself an Archetypal Linguist and so I know and cherish the importance of mythology, storytelling, and the human necessity of making meaning.Concepts of the Higher Self are necessary, but if we spend even one quarter of our spirit’s energy toward “achieving” higher self-hood, we are missing several points in our path of being embodied as humans.Even among some “shamanic” (I put this in quotes, because if I use this word, I note that we have to score this word with its Western fetishization)So even among some “shamanic” frameworks ( or otherwise known as earth- based spirituality), much of the content, the experiences, the workshops, classes and sessions are all based on the person, human concepts of “nature”, and projections: anthropomorphism. A lot of mainstream Western herbalism centers on what plants can do for us, rather than the inherent value of a plant’s living wisdom,a plant’s consciousnesswhether we pick and eat it or not.These practices still typically center healing people, guiding people, and serving people. Soul retrieval toward healing is potent trauma work. Necessary. But then we have hundreds of dollars to two-thousand- dollar weekend retreats and well, since I’ve written this, I’ll add an addendum, so much more, so many more for so much more money, workshops that promise attendees they will “level up” to their next “version” of themselves. That has a bit of a different flavor.There’s a fear of “playing small” especially in neo-liberal feminist girl-boss capitalist contexts.(Yeah, say that five times, fast.)I’m also told that in order to sell my work, either as an artist or as a spiritual facilitator, I have to present what I do in a way that appeals to potential clients’ sense of self, and how my work can help them. Things have to be framed within a package that centers a person.Like, in marketing lingo, but it’s also seeped into busisness training for spiritual facilitators, that you have to highlight what peoples’ problem is an then create a solution specific to that problem. In other words, sometimes even creating a problem for people that only you can solve, to sell your work And I cannot, will not, like, that’s just not how I’m able to approach things. And I won’t approach things from that perspective. And.And.There is the platitude that when we hea… Get full access to Animist Activist at animistactivistpod.substack.com/subscribe
