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Fellows in being, That we do: live in a society that invests in keeping us lost. It’s not a grand conspiracy. What we invest in is just ever-better-honing “here kitty kitty” to capture our awareness and direct it towards that which has been invested in. The investors are neither evil nor conspiring. They themselves are just as lost as everyone else, doing their best to get by or win at an imagined game they were born into with little awareness of the gift they distract from. In a society of the blind “here kitty kittying” the blind, where do we turn? To me, it slowly grows ever more obvious: direct to the source, of course. To direct experience unmediated by a confused culture. To land: the deserts and mountains and plains. To sky: its midday blue, clouds passing by, and the universe it reveals each and every night. To awareness: the root of experience itself (through simple meditations, long walks sans phones, the eternal present sans thought etc.). We can undercut the cultural confusion and get our awareness closer to truth by sloughing the fluff between our awareness and the ground of being itself. In a society ever-investing in remaining lost, remember: direct, raw, unmediated experience straight from the source is always around, yet to be confused, still able to be felt and found. What’s found at the source? Some of the finest philosophers and poets have spent their lives trying to tell us. But why take their word for it when you can drink straight from the well? The profoundest poems ever penned are but pointers, arrangements of symbols representing the grand thing, not the grand thing itself. Alan Watts liked to joke that, “the common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.” This July, I neither sucked nor stared at fingers pointing the way, but followed them into the Canadian Rockies on a fifteen-day road trip with the Yesman, his rad lady Olivia, and their campervan Big Tina. We danced three nights til dawn with a gang of DJs at Bass Coast, worked remote via Starlink, and worshipped the mountains and glaciers, rivers and waterfalls, grizzlies and eagles, by giving just about every other spare moment to walking and running and swimming and gawking and laughing when it was too epic to comprehend it all. I followed a series of pointing fingers far out as well. The first pointing finger was Sadhguru telling Joe Rogan he was healed by a mountain a few years ago. This curiously perplexed me and stuck in my head. Last summer, going down-and-back in the Grand Canyon with the closest-to-shaman woman I’ve yet to meet, I asked how this could be. Spot on and simple, her answer was a question: “Well, why are we here at the bottom of the Grand Canyon? Does this do anything to you?” I couldn’t logically grasp how, but it dawned on me that I had long been drawn to yawing walls of stone — be they canyons or mountains — and that prolonged encounters with grand faces of towering rocks have often elevated my experience and spirit, not just in the moment, but often for weeks afterwards. What happens when we perceive a mountain? I don’t know. But this July, I spent a few hours interfacing deeply with tremendous faces of Canadian Rockies. I stared into them, bowed before them, laughed and hummed with them. I closed my eyes and felt for their presence. I listened as their glaciers gnawed at them, marveling at their effortless and majestic repose among forces that chased us from their realm in but their mildest summer day or two. Back home, among 110° dog days of summer here in the valley of the sun, I am refreshed and recentered, feeling out a little wider and deeper than before. Society will capture my awareness and pull me in again, but I’m lucky and learning how to return to where the finest-aimed fingers point — and not just suck ‘em. With love & stoke, Ethan
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