i bowed not before the teacher, but before the wisdom he carried.
an expectation to bow to a teacher with no explanation of why might have caused me to want to walk straight out of the dharma hall. this has nothing to do with me having an innately rebellious nature. in fact, i hold teachers, elders, and scholars in high regard by default. i love learning. i consider humility a virtue.
but this past weekend, when i went to study with a teacher of a traditional wisdom lineage, i was inspired many times to bow before him. not because he expected this, nor because i was told to (i wasn’t). i simply had to, because it was an authentic expression of my reverence for the wisdom living in his body.
as a recovering theatre kid, bowing comes relatively naturally to me. it is an expression of gratitude, of reverence, and of humility. i am less used to bowing as a greeting, or as a sign of respect to a wisdom keeper. in the past, i would have resisted the latter entirely.
i have changed.
i am not against hierarchies; i think they can be good, and sometimes even necessary. what i find distasteful isn’t ‘hierarchy’ per se, it’s fragmentation. domination. oppression. bowing from a place of self-degradation actually disrespects the teacher. when we abandon our own depth of understanding, our ability to question, and our subjective learning process, we don’t actually receive the wisdom that a teacher is giving us. we merely perform receptivity.
i liken this to the cultural norm of ‘expertism’ and the way in which we are encouraged to seek knowledge and wisdom outside of our own subjective experience. the contemporary western world has historically disavowed subjectivity as a valid means of getting true information about reality; in more recent years, the culture has overcorrected for this, which ironically gives subjectivity an even worse name.
let us presuppose the obvious—that subject and object are fundamentally aspects of one whole, unbroken process. from this vantage point, how can we gain a full picture of reality without the phenomenological? how can i bow to the teacher, knowing full well it is a lie?
we live in a culture that claims the only people who are qualified to speak are people who have proven themselves in a particular way. they must display certain measurable qualities of intelligence, they must perform specific tests, they must devote four or more years to a piece of paper that says they’re worth hiring for an entry-level job.
getting a college degree is a sorry excuse for a rite of passage.
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i don’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything at all. learning is learning, and it’s not easy to slog through the hell of academia. i barely made it 6 months through my freshman year, so i’m one to talk. but true rituals of initiation are so much richer, so much fuller spectrum than just surviving years of rote memorization. true rituals of initiation are death processes that involve the land, the body, and the community. they involve the ancestors, the plant and animal kin, and the unseen forces. they show you how much of an expert you are not.
if you have a college degree and you’re proud of yourself, you should be. i only mean to say that the symbolic and somatic richness of ritual initiation is significantly atrophied here in the west. consider the following quote from my essay on contemporary ritual design:
Modern Western culture does not suffer from a lack of rituals, as is often stated; it suffers from a lack of meaningful, devotional, earth-based, collective ritual process. Our rituals exist, but they are insufficient; they lack intergenerationality, transcontextuality, ecosomatic attunement, and post-religious inclusivity. I believe there is an indirect relationship between the insufficiency of these rituals and the converging mental health, ecological, and political issues referred to in some intellectual circles as the ‘metacrisis’ (or ‘polycrisis’).
this ritual insufficiency is a huge reason why i have chosen to leave my home of 2.5 years: asheville, north carolina. the subculture of asheville is what you get when folks attempt to repair contemporary post-colonial fragmentation consciousness through ritual without actually examining that fragmentation consciousness at its root. it’s what happens when you can sense the ‘problem,’ but you forget that the way you solve problems and understand problems is actually part of the problem. it is what happens when you have been taught your entire life that what matters is how things appear, not how things feel.
kokoro wa katachi wo motome, katachi wa kororo wo susumeru.
this is a phrase i learned from a japanese language teacher on youtube. i haven’t been able to forget it since i came across it. it translates to the heart requests form, and form advances the heart. when i first heard it, i immediately thought of the closest english equivalent: ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ on the surface, these phrases seem to communicate the same thing, but i argue they’re different.
the difference between them is the same as that between performative ritual and ritual performance. performative ritual tries to make true what is false. ritual performance teaches the body how to express and remember what is true.
expertise is not true. expertise is not wisdom. it is a symptom of forgetting how to learn. it is a comfort zone of knowledge that blinds us to the moving, flowing, emergent reality that we dance within.
i bowed to the teacher because my body is wise—wise enough to sense wisdom in another, wise enough to express reverence, wise enough to be with what is true.
Happy underworlding.
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I didn’t want it to end! Thanks for writing, Scout.
thank you. bless your path-making.