Dear Son - I am Joining a Cult

Dear son, 

I can’t raise you. Not because I don’t love you, but because I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust this world. I don’t trust this angry deluded mind. I don’t trust how adding billions more to this hot planet won’t kill us all. I don’t know where you are, son  —  but I can hear your whisper. I can feel your ache to breathe. I can see your dreams to play with me. But it pains me to say, you must not be born. 

Please forgive me. Please try to understand. Why must you sacrifice a lifetime of play? 

Because I am weak son. Because I am a mystical man child who is wise enough to know how beautiful —yet how truly wicked I am. How much healing is still left in this traumatized body. How many shadows still lurk in my underworld. How much ignorance still shit coats my lenses of looking. I must break this chain of pain  —  for you, me and the world. 

But don’t you ever forget son, my soul longs to play with you. It wants to melt in cosmic awe as your acorn blossoms into a majestic oak of being. It wants to guide you as you discover your emotional playground. It wants to teach you everything that I had to painfully learn on my own. 

While holding my dreams of you, my soul also feels the misery, hopelessness, and overwhelm of the current ecological genocide. The forests that burn. The reefs that choke. Economic systems that oppress. The soil that washes away. The technology that manipulates. The glaciers that drown. And it’s only the beginning. It’s only the fucking beginning son. Insert capitalist consumer rant here  —  but the bottomless greed and race for more more more is bringing not only civilization, but ALL of life on earth towards extinction. And all for what son? Same day deliveries of more junk that won’t make it to your 3rd birthday?

So how can I birth you into this madness? Please tell me how. 

Sure I could give you a pretty sweet life. A little permaculture homestead with mom sounds quite nice actually. Well, if there was a mom. Maybe this void is at the root of it all? 

But a deeper part of me wonders, how will this dream of you help anything? It will be meaningful. I will grow as a human growing you. I will fulfill a primordial itch of life to breed more life. But the unfortunate truth is that it's also like the adult form of playing doll house while the world burns.  

How can I raise you and look you in the eyes and not drown in shame? The beautiful play of your life will enliven me, but will it not simply distract me from the tragedy on the global stage? Will it not incrementally contribute to millions of children and billions of beings dying?  

I don’t fucking know son. Maybe I am a coward. Maybe I am a hero. But I am definitely a deluded fool. Our current meta crisis is the Hero’s Journey of our age, and our current predicament calls for a Hero’s journey of the collective consciousness. A cultural, political and systemic metamorphosis to avoid collapse and chaos. This is our struggle son, it’s beautiful and scary as fuck!

I just don’t know how I can serve you and the world. How will this extractive world not prey upon my love for you? If I bring you into this world, will I not  have to commit to you?  Will I not have to provide for you? Sure, my inner King and Warrior will emerge  —  but I also will have to play societies’ games. I will have to outcompete my neighbor to send you to a better school. An entire machine and system will entice me to climb the corporate ladder. Slowly, incentive by incentive, I will sacrifice part of my integrity to show you my love by being a successful provider. I will sell more widgets for this god of progress, all while more beings die.

Some call this commitment. Some call it responsibility. For some, don’t hate the player — hate the game. But what if the game is fucking rigged son? What if the game is being complacent in destructive and oppressive systems that threatens to kill life on earth? What if I can’t have you without playing this murderous game? 

I don’t know the way, but my heart knows there must be a better way. A way with more beauty and less needless greed. More transcendental truth and less consumer bullshit. More connection and less connectivity. Son, I want more — for myself, for you and for the world. 

For that reason —  you must not be. I must sacrifice your existence for life’s existence. And for that reason —  I am joining a cult.

COOL CULTS vs CRAZY CULTS 

I know, I said the C word — such a loaded word is this “cult”. My spine reverberates just saying it. But what is a word anyways son? Does the word love even begin to touch the full range of that human experience? So goes the landscape of possibilities with this dirty little cult word. 

Excuse my history lesson son. But the word cult doesn't have to mean some sex cult with a guru nor poisoned Koolaid death cults. The word cult's origin is via culture and cultivate. Its’ latin roots (cultus) has meanings from  "tilling or cultivation" to "training or education”. This training and this cultivation  — of both heart and mind  — is why this angry and lonely man child must join a cult. 

I sense you're still worried about this Cult business son. Just know we are all in a cult. Jesus's kingdom of heaven within is a cult. Cross-Fit is a cult. Capitalism and the myth of progress is a cult. Hell your local neighborhood bar is a cult, instead of cultivating bliss in the heart, it trains in getting shit-faced and letting loose. But the important thing son, is not what a cult really is — but why it must be. 

Any new spiritual movement must first be a cult before it becomes an established religion. Cults power innovation. Cults can be crazy or they can make better humans. 

This cool cult I am joining is about community of connection. A loving community trying to make better humans integrated with love, wisdom and power. Not as an endless self-development project —  but to serve all beings. To live a good life that is more in harmony, a life that doesn’t destroy and kill needlessly. Jesus, that sounds so fairy tale land. But I guess that just shows how insane our society has become son, that harmony is “naive”. Just pause to contemplate that — harmony is naive in modernity.

But this cult isn't hippies singing songs around the fire. It's a neo-monastic training center filled with 18 hour days that strives to awaken leaders and educate them in embodied ethics. Relying on the Buddha Dharma and western psychological insights, this cult isn’t running away from the problems. Instead, it’s trying to cultivate enlightened leaders to foster enlightened systems to solve global problems. Fusing wisdom with power and power with wisdom, it's trying to address the root of the problem — our crazy monkey minds. 

Joining a cult in the mountains of Vermont could be a huge mistake son. But I have done and smoked worse. Hell I could have lived the simple life being a monk in the jungles in Thailand. I almost did. But partly due to my avoidant commitment problems and partly due to a deep intuition — part of me felt I was running away from the Hero’s journey of our time. Would your future home burn while I relied on alms to eat? Yet if I birthed you, wouldn’t I just be putting my thumb on the scale of death? 

Who knows son. Our current path is ominous. And this current cult likely will fail. But it’s a beautiful experiment and we all have to try something or we likely will all die. And so son, this tug of war in my heart is why you must not be and why I must join the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth. I don’t know the way, but there must be a better way — whether we find it, bury it, or create it. 

My one and only son, I love you now and always. Until we meet in this life or the next. 

With grief and love, 

Alf