In conjunction with the many insights I’m getting as I ready for my online course UP FROM RUINS , particularly in relation to destiny, I’ve decided to offer some of it up as blog posts. The first one, on economy, money, and destiny, is for patreon patrons only, but if you’re not a patron, you can sign up to read it here. The second appeared on this site, HOW DESTINY DOESN’T WORK: THREE BAD IDEAS ABOUT DESTINY.

Friends, a basic and common question about life is really a destiny question:

How do I know if I’m on the right path?

For much of our lives, our feeling orients us to our path. It’s process that is not unlike eating: We form direction from what tastes good and what doesn’t. Like food that gets chewed up and digested and longed for again, or food that gets spat out and refused in the future; our taste forms the path. We believe we’re on the right path because life feels good, or off it because life feels bad.

Most people who don’t develop ambition stay at this base level of being guided. This isn’t a comment on the value of ambition or lack of ambition, but just an observation of the guidance system. Life is right when it feels right, not right when it doesn’t.

As ambition develops, a different relationship to time develops, too. A picture of the hoped-for future emerges in connection with how we view our past. Rather than just making our way through life, we start to perceive that there may be way to something/somewhere/some goal we want. 

This experience of time means that career paths, family paths, artistic paths, and more, turn life into more than taste. Our feeling becomes tempered with thoughts in a different way. We encounter states of expectation, images of stability, a sense of responsibility to others, and an eye for progress. This is particularly true if you’re spiritually inclined (and if you’re reading this, you probably are). 

Let me just say this in the most basic way possible: when you move from mere taste-making to goal-setting, on your path, you meet the challenge of things not going your way. Duh! So now what?

Up comes the self help and new age mantra that is so popular now that it’s a mainstreamed cliche:

“Everything happens for a reason!”

It’s so widespread that it’s virtually void of weight at this point. And it’s easy prey for skeptics, critics, and cynics: Isn’t meaning-making just an attempt to create solace by tacking on the illusion of coherence?

But what is really meant by “everything happens for a reason” – when self helpers declare it and when skeptics attack it – is that the bad stuff happens for a reason. 

The same critics who dismiss the “reason” trope aren’t so quick to say that good stuff happens for no reason, are they? 

No, when good stuff happens, it’s often attributed to effort and hard work.

Achievement – like becoming a popular skeptic! – is something to be proud of. No “reason” needed there for the self helpers, either; why give to God what you can proudly blog about?

Of course, spiritually- and intellectually-inclined people will draw from seemingly deeper wells to avoid seeming incoherent or boastful.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the Chinese farmer.

Here it is, told by Alan Watts:

It’s difficult to not love Alan Watts; he’s like an Oscar Wilde for people who don’t want their spiritual wit proximal to anal sex. 

But does this story usefully meet us where we’re at today?
If it’s neither good or bad to be violently thrown from a horse, then what could possibly give us direction?

The same story, told from an opposite direction, looks like an erotic terror novel by French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. His novels Story of the Eyeand the even more deliriously excessiveBlue of Noon  present characters who have “managed, with no respect for conventional pigeonholes, to eliminate every possible urge…”

Instead of things just happening to people on the roller coaster of connected events, life appears in Bataille’s novels to be a series of events driven by desires. Characters go in search of fulfilling every appetite. This includes necrophilia, violence, mutilation, eroticizing war, and more. Anything that gets in the way is seen as a willed consequence of choice.

Why wait for dramatic stuff to happen to you when you can run to it yourself? 

In the case of the Chinese farmer, the “process of nature” holds you in a daily anxiety-inducing sway. In Bataille’s novels, immersion into desire gives the illusion of of choosing the sway.

So! The zen guru can convince himself he’s virtuous because he accepts suffering, the libertine can convince herself she’s in control because she experiences pleasure.

I want to note here that though these two options – Watts’s and Bataille’s – may seem foreign to you, they are probably closer than you think. Here are some other versions of them:

• Mindfulness: the embrace of suffering by focusing on the world as a series of neutral sensations, even if they suck. 
• Cognitive-behavioral-therapizing suffering away to feel good, or microdosing them into a soft acceptable fuzz. 
• Manifesting the things that give you pleasure, and if something or someone gets in the way getting them/it out of the way.
• Going to psychoanalysis to accept the absence of ever being truly fulfilled in the roller coaster of life. 
• Reading continental philosophers like Deleuze & Guattari to validate the experience of life as one full of momentarily fulfilling disjointed pleasure experiences, connected by hidden desire. 

And so on. Okay, okay, I’m obviously, egregiously, simplifying the above. But I’m also tired of each position and its opposition being hailed as endlessly complex when they’ve merely been complicated by academic thinkers. The underlying choice is mostly dualistic and ultimately absurd:

Suffering or pleasure – which one do you want to see as happening for a reason?

Destiny, and especially what I call Destiny-work offer a different picture that includes both suffering and pleasure without reducing them the Chinese farmer story or the Bataille novel.

An easy(ish!) way to express this is by looking at the life development of plants. Plants give us a picture that tells us about growth, rhythm, and change, without being so personalized that they create intense feelings off the bat. (As my mentor the biologist/geoscientist Lynn Margulis used to say, “the closer to humans science is, the worse the evidence gets.”)

The wild radish leaves below grow at differing stages of the radish’s development.

Describing this photo, biologist Craig Holdredge writes, “All the leaves from the main stem of a wild radish…The first leaves develop at the bottom of the plant… the small leaf (at the right end of the row) is the uppermost leaf and the last one to develop; it precedes the first flower.”

If you were only to look at the radish at a moment in time, you wouldn’t see all of its leaves, and the leaves are, in some cases, very differently shaped. And they grow at different times within the radish’s life cycle. And of course, even when the final leaf is there, the flower has not yet appeared. Furthermore, after the flower does appear there is still more to the radish’s life. New versions of “radish” appear in the cycle, and even its withering death is itself a differing form.

This means that you cannot actually see the “real” plant if you just look at it in a fixed moment in time. 

This is no mere metaphor.

The principle for humans is the same:

We cannot know the truth of our incarnation and our destinies because the truth is only revealed in its fullness. In other words, when the incarnation ends. The arc of Destiny is one that happens across a lifetime. We can’t see it because by the time it expresses itself, we’ve crossed into death. 

That means:

Whether or not everything happens for a reason is a diversion from a deeper truth: that Destiny is expressing itself with us.

Instead of taking Alan Watts’s lesson, the psychoanalyst’s lesson, the mindfulness lesson to embrace suffering and discomfort
or
taking Bataille’s lesson, CBT’s lesson, or the manifester’s lesson to create/clear a pathway of pleasure;
we could instead understand that destiny is happening to us, taking form through our lives, with us.

The real meaning is fully expressed and accessible if we focus on what Destiny is. This would mean engaging with Destiny-work. How do we get in touch with what it means to be human, both growing into life and holding the promise of our deaths? 

When we do Destiny-work, suffering and pleasure both absorb light, water and nutrients, as we expand upward and downward. Nothing happens for a reason, all reasons converge in us.

More confused now than you were before? Alan Watts would probably laugh and say, “good!” Instead of doing that, I’m offering a course.

*

I’ll be exploring all of this and more in my online course, live call, and one-on-one offering:

UP FROM RUINS:
USING DESTINY-WORK TO CONNECT SELF-DEVELOPMENT & WORLD CHALLENGES

• ∴ Exclusive new offering UP FROM RUINS: USING DESTINY-WORK TO CONNECT SELF DEVELOPMENT WITH WORLD CHALLENGES, 90 minutes, streaming on July 1, available as a recording July 2
• ∵ Live call on July 9 available as recording on July 10
• ∴ LIMITED option for one-on-one Destiny-work meeting
• ∵ Resource list for all participants featuring readings, exercises, links to
• investigate deeper, poetry, a playlist, and more.

DOORS OPEN to patreon patrons June 8 and to everyone else June 11.

Portal for one-one-one work closes JUNE 19 (or earlier if holding capacity is reached)

Streaming lecture July 1 (2PM EST)

Recorded lecture posts July 2

Live call July 9 (12 noon EST)

One-on-one leadership work scheduled individually

SIGN UP HERE TODAY

or for more info, click here.