If you ask me, the world is in need of a paradigm shift, one where we no longer breed billions of foot soldiers for this single-file march toward infinite growth as progress. But how does one begin to make a shift such as this?
I’d say by transforming one’s own self, first. And this is the hardest part of all, as it must include delinking from existing capitalistic mechanisms, while coddiwompling—traveling toward an unknown ideal, without a clue of how to unravel the deep lock of a system that has been operating for longer than one’s lifetime.
And the challenge is not even that of learning to live without some of the many material wants and needs, within a very colonial matrix of power. It is rather about how to get its problematic ideals out of one’s head, its ways out of one’s body, it’s cloaks off of one’s spirit.
This is what I am trying to do, one day at a time. It is why I have elected to become a social experiment in my own life, as I mindlessly meander away from certain fragmentary ways of knowing how to live in this world; that is, away from ways that I believe are leading us headlong over a cliff of planetary extinction.
My journey towards alternative modes of sensing, relating and becoming in this world (in ways that are still substantially unknown to me) feels lonely. This is even while I observe others striving to transform reality in a multitude of ways. My loneliness is such because as I view the rhythm of so much struggle to create change, I also see how the many rites of differing modes of practice consume us. They also lead us into contestations of each other’s practices; thus, taking us away from the very value of the shared principles we wish to manifest. We all are often so devoured by the singularity of our made-up rituals—becoming separated by our own ideas on how we can do something good (that doesn’t yet exist, in fact, appears to be impossible) in the mêlée of so much cruelty, hardship, and loss.
I see our quests for a paradigm shift as a spiritual journey through the dark spots of our soul, where we must often sit still in the discomfort of our anxieties, wants and desires, as well as the madness we create as a consequence of their fulfilment. It is here that we can begin to undo, unlearn, unthink, and unbecome into goodness knows what or how exactly.
This is why I fill the vast void of not knowing with certain desired imaginings.
At the smallest personal scale, I imagine this world as a place where I do not just live to work, so as to continue to be in an inordinate amassing of material wealth. I rather, envisage my becoming into a humble existence that is not self-serving at every given opportunity. Basically, being a consciousness that strives to have long-standing intimate relations with all species in a world of creative unfolding.
And in order to obtain even a modicum of this reality, my task in this moment is tough but simple: to first decolonize, thus, transform myself with certain critical consciousness and Love for WE versus ME.
In doing so, I may well also transform the world, since with my shift I would have a series of different relationships with everyone and everything around me, and they too with those around them—rippling out into an infinite pool of space and time; hence, shifting the reality that exists and making waves of possibility other than what is currently believed (by even myself) to be the only obvious way of living, doing, thinking, being, loving and so on.
So, I am now—with that insurmountable goal at hand—trying to be an artist-scientist who creates at the margins of the hierarchical and binary landscape that such a label suggests. I do so while, at the same time, trying to be a conscious manifestor of a different-yet-undefined reality for this material self of mine.
My intention, to live by unlearning, is why I must also (try to) do the following:
Absent myself from a world in which things and people have become emotional clutches and technology is the enabler.
This is my call to live an unchained life: unchained from status and materiality.
It is why I must discover who I am without the accolades, or more like what I can become.
And perhaps this will move me toward recognizing that I am a mere fractal of (and within) an interconnected existence of WE consciousness. The paradigm shift!
And it is here that I seek liberation from my desirous thoughts and deeds, including even these hopes for change.
For I want to move closer to being LOVE in all my relationships, including with myself. I also long to locate my own TUMI (omnipotence), plus the power inherent in embodying it just so.
It is a reminder to let my little light shine in all its none-sensical glory, while slowly dropping all the social and cultural filters that I have learnt to use to fit into this current kind of normativity.
For after all, what you accumulate in this life is yours, but it is never you. And so, I try to decolonize my very being, doing, loving and living. I intend to do so by seeking a return to my enigmatic essence, while working with such divine gifts as drawing, writing, knowledge loving, and helping others wherever and whenever I can.
This is also a call for me to be bold enough to say how I choose to see, aspire for and imagine this world, without concern about whether or not it is still an unfinished project, or that the idea for freedom from the known may be rejected and/or received as a form of confused and self-indulgent madness.
For “ABRACADABRA”; what we speak, we manifest. And so how then can another world become, if I do not incantate it into possibility—even if rather incoherently?