Embodiment Hour Tomorrow at 12p EST @ The Stoa ~ Non-Linear Worlds and Destabilized Perception, Oh Dear!
Embodiment Hour Tomorrow at 12p EST @ The Stoa ~ Non-Linear Worlds and Destabilized Perception, Oh Dear!
Let's sit together in the unsettling (but, super-promising) reality of life post-linearity.
Dear Friends,
Embodiment Hour is one of those beautiful projects that is revealing its gifts slowly; opening petal by petal each week into deeper insights, mutual trust, and dare I say it…loving care. I honestly feel like this kind of embodied media literacy is essential for our wellbeing!
Now that we are several weeks in, I can more effectively describe the experience and the value in it. I hope this inspires you to join tomorrow if you’ve been curious. It is a path to deep media literacy and full-bodied sense making. I highly recommend you give it a try if you are:
overwhelmed by the state of the world
curious about embodiment, emotions, and how to be more adept with them in your life and relationships
wanting tools to help you build empathy and understanding for challenging conversations and building bridges across ideological divides
wanting to feel more connected to your intuition and inner barometer for truth
eager to protect yourself from being manipulated by “bad faith communication”
ready to process experience and seek solutions to complex issues collectively
Each week I come into the session with my small and sometimes wobbly point of view on an issue and after an hour of listening and learning from the experience of others, I walk away with a much more nuanced, well-rounded, and satisfying clarity.
I am constantly surprised by how pleasant and deeply reassuring it is to be in a space where people share honestly and vulnerably how a piece of media content has affected them—how they feel about what’s being shared, rather than what they think. Even if I disagree or am having a very different experience, I am nourished by the simple truth in their sharing. I know where they stand…we know where we stand with each other.
Again and again, someone articulates something I am feeling better than I could have myself. Feelings can be mysterious, we help each other access them and sort them out.
Feeling truly is healing. Life as a human in these times can be an isolating experience…we watch the news or our social media feeds and feel more and more alone. By coming together to share our embodied experience of the media, we knock down those walls of isolation and we relate! The mind can fragment, but the heart connects.
We can process difficult news together more easily because we co-regulate; we hold each other in the witnessing of the world’s pain. We open ourselves to watching or experiencing news that might be overwhelming to handle alone.
We learn about a lot of things that are going on that we might not have noticed because it’s not directly within our area of interest. Since March, we’ve looked at movie clips, grammy awards, celebrity outtakes, war photos…the variety of stimulus keeps us informed and broadens our horizons.
After several weeks of holding this beautiful space, I am more informed than I have in years and it feels really good. I had been avoiding and “titrating” difficult news because it triggered me and I couldn’t go on with my day. It all felt like “too much” for my small self, but working through our feelings together I feel emboldened, encouraged, and empowered.
As I get to know those of you who are coming regularly, I am beginning to really trust your perspective, your felt sense of things, your lived experience and how you bring that into the space. I am feeling more and more comfortable in the “we” that is doing the sensing as we make sense of the week’s news and culture through our bodies, minds, and hearts.
I hope you feel that, too. Now, on to this week’s prompt—warning: it’s a challenging one.
Tomorrow: Non-Linear Worlds and Destabilized Perception, Oh Dear!
Spoiler alert - I like to introduce the week’s topic and offer clips for those who don’t like surprises. If you do, you can wait until tomorrow to watch the below along with us.
Have you ever wondered if maybe there are parallel worlds happening simultaneously? Have you ever had the thought, or the feeling, that time isn’t quite as linear as it seems? Or that perhaps there are many dimensions of experience beyond what we can experience with our gross senses? I know you have.
“What if there is a planet out there just like earth but in another galaxy? And what if there is another me out there having a different life?”
This week we’re going to tackle the fragmentation of media and how it mirrors the fragmentation of reality…in other words, how we’re moving into a chaos paradigm and the different ways we can cope with that.
The topic was inspired by the news today of the fall from grace of a fascinating and devious character in the Russian saga, Vladislav Surkov. Surkov went from being Putin’s right hand and the founder of “Putinism,” to being placed under house arrest for embezzlement. The press is seeing this as more evidence of the deterioration of Putin’s inner circle and weakening hold on power.
What I’d like for us to watch together tomorrow is a clip from a hard-hitting documentary called Bitter Lake, by the British documentarian and provocateur, Adam Curtis. I’ll let Wikipedia make the introduction to his fascinating process:
Curtis was a relatively conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion.”
In this clip, Curtis introduces us to Surkov and describes his strategy for political control: “undermine people’s perception of the world so they never know what’s happening.” Curtis goes on to describe Surkov’s concept of “Nonlinear War,” which was used in the annexation of Crimea, and presumably in the current conflict in Ukraine: “The aim is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.” These ideas have been highly influential beyond Russia in the UK and in Trump’s unpredictable and destabilizing tactics in the U.S.
In the clip, Curtis shows us how this practice of fragmenting and scrambling the media messages coming at the public takes us out of the comfort and coherence of a linear paradigm and catapults us into a nightmarish chaos, producing a state of helplessness, hopelessness and impotence—an “oh dear” quality in his British parlance. I know this feeling myself from the Trump years. To think that it was artfully orchestrated by a Russian theater performer turned Rasputin is chilling.
HOWEVER, the experience of a single, linear narrative isn’t actually very helpful anymore in a world where we seem to be moving closer to the right perception of things—which is to say—nonlinear, cyclical, emergent, simultaneous, sometimes chaotic, and holographic. So much of what is happening for us collectively is a loosening of the control paradigm we’ve been operating in for centuries, if not millennia. Social justice has done many things for us, one of them is the introduction of the idea that the dominant narrative does not fit, suit, or represent all people—not even remotely. In fact, a single dominant story about what’s happening can be used to oppress and alienate people.
From this perspective, fragmentation and chaos don’t need to be chilling proposition. Surkov is onto something fundamentally true about the nature of reality and perception, only he’s using it for nefarious means—just like a Black Magician.
The Tantras and Sutras are full of references to multiple parallel universes and Buddhaverses. The Buddha was always portrayed as teaching in multiple universes simultaneously—giving every listener exactly what they need in the language they can most easily understand. Spacetime is no barrier for realized beings, apparently. Great adepts like Padmasambhava (8th c) and his dākinis moved through time and worlds to plant treasure teachings—terma—that are revealed precisely when they are needed. The simultaneity of these worlds is a key to their being accessible.
Another piece of stimulus we may look at is the trailer to a new movie called Everything Everywhere All At Once starring Michelle Yeoh. You can see how the movie poster itself looks like a Tibetan tanghka:
I haven’t seen the movie, yet. But it also explores the idea of multiple possible realities and lives. One woman is tasked with saving all the universes by accessing her powers from all possible lives.
As we grapple with our own evolving relationship to the world(s) we live in…I mean co-create constantly…it’s good to feel into the way fragmentation can be used to generate anxiety and instability and the way it can be incredibly liberating and empowering. Will we move into the post-linear reality as victims or as victors? Come see what the whole topic brings up for you…for us…as we explore it together.
See you tomorrow!