Spiritual Praxis or How Do We Get From Here to There? Rev. Glen Ganaway

Spiritual Praxis or How Do We Get From Here to There?

by Rev. Glen Ganaway IM (Satyre Marsayas)

My first political memory is of the Vietnam war. Well, actually my first political memory is watching dead soldiers being loaded into the back of a helicopter and television footage of bombs dropping on lush jungles. I was seven. My parents watched every single moment of the Watergate Trial and subsequent hearings on PBS every night. My first vote for president was Jimmy Carter. I am the oldest son of a Southern Baptist Preacher. Politics and Spirituality have been intertwined for me my whole life.

In her short story, “The Dispossessed,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” As a minister, I would say revolution is a lifestyle. It is a way of being. I also say it is who are as human beings. My politics can be summed up today as perpetual revolution or perpetual awakening. How do I live that way? I’m going to attempt to tell you. It’s deeply wrapped up why I call myself a Radical Faerie and Mystical Anarchist.

Why do we want to change the world? There would be no politics if we didn’t want to change our communities and how they operate and the experiences they produce. We can hardly conceive of living or being human without this desire. I think of that desire as proof we want a mature, healthy society. And when we recognize that our communities are not healthy we conceive of actions to be taken for their healing. It matters not what one’s ‘politics’ are at this point. So here’s a thought. We’re actually attempting to heal ourselves by healing the world. I’d like to offer a reversal to that. To be effective in our politics, and why have them if they don’t deliver the goods, we ourselves must heal.

I believe this is a creative process. Robert Fritz has spent his life studying the creative process. Fritz says “I call the relationship between the vision and current reality structural tension. During the creative process, you have an eye on where you want to go, and you also have an eye on where you currently are.” In politics it’s the tension between what we want and where we are. The reason why a healthy society is so hard to achieve isn’t that we don’t know what we want, what Fritz is calling vision. It’s that we don’t know where we are, our current reality. Reality, I will offer, isn’t a description of a physical place. Reality is a flowing, moving, vibrant and alive experience. This act of tension-resolution is a method of getting the world we want. To create the world we want we must first know who we are.

Few of us, in the hegemony we are currently living through, have created the conditions that produce self knowledge. Radical Faeries have been asking this question in the context of society and politics and spirituality for a very long time. I think that using this tension-resolution structural model is an easy way to think about politics without it devolving into a theoretical discussion. To create effective actions that work today to bring us to an experience we want, we must be in continual awakening to our revolutionary potential. As Radical Faeries we know of our connection to all living beings. We operate from a world view of being embedded in nature, as a component of a whole system. We, as is nature, are growing, changing and evolving.

Centering on whole systems thinking, an orientation of embededness, is where our focus needs greater attention, so that we act from our place of connection. Counter intuitively these actions cannot be motivated by results, or any imagined future. I believe our praxis, or right action, must come from this knowledge of ourselves. As a Mystical Anarchist I would call this means matching ends. Centering on results tends to slip into manipulation, in my experience. Doing what is right, being our healed, human, connected Fae selves is how to take action. Always true to who we are. Take action based on who we are produces results that match the truth of our deepest understanding; in relationship with all beings.

The hegemony will have us believe that compromise will get us further. It’s not true. In politics this is called ‘the ratchet effect’ because this compromise tends to only go one way: to the right. I’ve seen this tragic shift in my lifetime. Its toxic individualism. Its experts, and authority figures, celebrity culture and the notion of ‘an exceptional man’ will save us. Successful, healthy change is a community activity. What decisions would we make if we were building and supporting an (eco)system to produce what was needed? Anarchism is that operating system. Compromising our health and well being takes a bite out of our integrity. I want to ask you not to ever compromise on who you are. Can we practice making decisions from place of connection, relationship and power? Consider: who we are is an us. In this community, this place, this planet and all its beings, is where identity lies. That is who we are. The most deeply, spiritually, and powerfully effective political decisions are made from this place of knowing.

So what does perpetual awakening, Whole Systems Theory and the Creative Process have to do with each other? And why am wrapping all those things up with the red and black flag of Anarchism?

Remember the Structural-Tension of the Creative Process? I believe the creative process is the best way to understand what we mean by politics. Politics is the individual and group contributions that promise either individual and/or group healing. Politics are the attempt to create a better future. It’s the creative process and the current hegemony is treating it like a game at best or horse race at worse. We make poor decisions from this place of gamesmanship. We lose sight of our goal of healing ourselves and our communities.

Knowing where we are is the most difficult part of the creative process. We have real difficulty, as humans, seeing and describing what is right in front of us. Is this fascism? The Talking Heads line “This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?” is a real problem. We’ve normalized poverty, war, industrial food, white nationalism and so much more. Whole Systems Theory offers us good tools to describe where we are. Fritjof Capra describes Whole Systems Theory this way: “All these natural systems are wholes whose specific structures arise from the interactions and interdependence of their parts. The activity of systems involves a process known as transaction- the simultaneous and mutually interdependent interaction between multiple components.” It’s not just one thing is it?

That’s why politics is too difficult to talk about. It’s not one cause, it’s not going to be one solution. It’s going to take a cultural shift to get where we want to go. Acting like we are a community of biomes is a start. That would give us a way of talking about where we are. It’s more than our poor souls, isn’t it? It’s poor education. It’s inadequate healthcare. It’s meaningless work. All of our tools and activities are designed to keep us separate from each other. For example, I live in a third floor walk up in Brooklyn, New York with the love of my life, Yolanda, a very fat cat named Graycee and a composting worm bin. I am a known in my building, my neighborhood, and by my local, state and national representatives as well. I know the deli clerks, even the local Imam. All of these things affect me and how I make decisions and I effect the activities of the neighborhood as well, I assure you. I refuse to be separate or act like I live in a bubble. I continually orient myself to Me as Us. Is that doable? I think we must show up in our communities as examples of living authenticity. It’s living up to Harry Hay’s request to ‘throw off the frogskin’. Or as Walt Whitman declares: “I contain multitudes!” Finding ourselves where we are is the task at hand and where we begin. And from there we can make better decisions about what is ours to do.

This is our perpetual orientation toward healing, our perpetual awakening; seeing ourselves as a living, breathing, growing system. We are alive, perpetually blooming into this moment. I will argue that this is the most accurate place to describe

Photograph by Covelo

where we are. It’s actually the second step in the creative process. The first step is always our human orientation toward our desire to change the world, and ourselves in the process. That’s the easy part, I think.

Politics is the way we talk about the direction we want to go in this dance of tension-resolution. How to resolve tension! That is the question. Unlike Socialism, Communism, or Capitalism, Anarchism isn’t a destination. It’s a method. Holding to restorative justice, radical equality, radical equity and radical democracy outlines our steps on this journey of collective and personal healing. The International Workers of World, an anarchist union, has a slogan: “A Harm to One is a Harm to All”. Martin Luther King Jr put it another way. He said “No one is free until we are all free.” The spiritual practice I follow puts it this way: To have peace, teach peace.

Saul Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals lays out that the ten principals for decision making are all about the ethics of means matching ends. He does so because they work. Why do anything if it doesn’t work? I’ll not go over them here, but I would encourage you to find the book and read it. He offers the spiritual principal that like creates like in the context of ethical organizing. No one really knows exactly what the future is going to look like, but we can know how we want it to work. It must be a healthy system that naturally produces abundance for all beings, right? A system that supports human and planetary development at its highest skill level. Well we must act within those perimeters today. Make personal decisions like they matter, because they do. That is what is meant when the Feminists of the 70s developed the slogan “The personal is political.” Acting like everything we do matters to the well being of whole because, I assure you, it does. Remember how we’re embedded in relationships? That is the realization that we do not need nor want gods or masters, but we want to pursue and experience healing for ourselves and our communities. And we cannot do this as isolated individuals: homo-economicus.

The Overton Window of what we’re allowed to conceive in this hegemony is very telling. Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism says “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I think that’s because we just cannot imagine a now that creates it. What are the conditions that create the world we want? First of all it begins with self knowledge; that I am in a whole system in which I am not better, worse, more or less necessary than any other item in this web of relationships. I think that’s revolutionary. To practice that, to live in that we space, is exhilarating, challenging and daunting all at the same time.

One of my favorite Anarchist thinkers, Murray Bookchin, in Post Scarcity Anarchy put it this way “There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.” Who is dictating what we do, when, how, etc? We might not really think about it most of the time. But here’s a political angle for you: How do you/I perform culture? Revolutionary Culture, anyone? Remember Saint Ursula and her ‘You can only be the Revolution.”? Good politics is right there, isn’t it. Our healing is right there isn’t it. The change we seek, that illusive future, becomes visible today. This requires our creativity, something us Fae excel at exercising in various ways. We’re not so susceptible to the hegemony that may be over influential to others. That is why we’re so necessary right now. To inhabit the Spirit of Revolution!

We are not all called to do the same things. We certainly don’t inhabit or perform culture in the same ways, do we. Bill Moyers, a journalist and author has four roles for activists (And I would say, Revolutionaries and Radicals). Citizen, Rebel, Reformer and Change Agent. There are effective and ineffective ways of performing these roles, of course. And this space isn’t to go into that. I am asking my fellow Fae to see ourselves as

Photograph by Covelo

fluidly moving through these roles as the situation requires. We must begin to do the rebelling and building at the same time. Matching Means and Ends. Modeling Authenticity, Centering our Relationship to All Beings, and take actions that create the conditions of Peace. This is politics. Our healing demand it. Viva La Revolution!