February 2025 Void Contemplations
Anarchist dharma vs capitalist spirituality, pastoral ID Music updates, and other cold comforts
Hola amigx. Paraphrasing legacy Onion columnist Jim Anchower: I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been spending a lotta time quietly reflecting on all the things going on in my life. And I’ve been spending a lotta time retreating from all the things going on in the world outside of our peaceful downtown Muncie apartment. After all of this reflection and retreat, I’m not sure I have anything new to say?
If you’d like to skip to the Inter-Dimensional Music streams and downloads, scroll down.
Though as mystics and seekers in the many Taoist-derived schools of thought have suggested many many many times over many hundreds of years, maybe there’s never been much new to say: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
In one of the early chapters of Fritjof Capra’s charmingly dated 1975 book The Tao of Physics, he expands on the mystical concept the undergirds the rest of the publication: “The fact – obvious from any reading of the newspapers – that humanity has not become much wiser over the past two thousand years, in spite of a prodigious increase in rational knowledge, is ample evidence of the impossibility of communicating absolute knowledge by words.”
So I keep coming back to two of the familiar concepts that have given me comfort – however cold that comfort may be – during difficult times. They’re both pieces of language that I’ve featured on the radio show and here in the newsletter over and over. The first comes from Zen teacher Joko Beck. It’s a bit of a downer but in a way that might be healthier for some of us than the inevitable letdown that accompanies more optimistic mindfulness riffs.
“Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life,” she writes in Everyday Zen. “But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.”
The starkness of Joko’s dharma talks do not offer the easiest passage into Zen practice. As a longtime dharma brother who studied with her once told me, “Joko yielded the sword of compassion wisely. She was tough.” As my longtime teacher at the Indianapolis Zen Center once suggested, “Maybe don’t start the introduction to meditation sessions with dharma talks about giving up hope?”
But for some of us it’s a welcome counterbalance to the persistent appropriation of Zen, yoga, and other Buddhist-adjacent schools of thought into the abominable capitalist spirituality cult of “McMindfulness.” Meditation is not a panacea. It’s not for everyone. Buddhism is the ideal spiritual practice . . . for Buddhists. The potentially harmful effects of meditation have been well documented for as long as people have been meditating. Zen can be put to many uses, including as justification for brutal imperialism. This risk of harm may be amplified when people commodify these practices into things as innocent as “5% happier” or as nefarious as attempts by corporations to pacify their workers, or military applications intended to turn soldiers into even more resilient killing machines.
“There's no doubt that people are suffering from anxiety and stress and depression,” McMindfulness author Ronald Purser told the CBC in a 2019 interview. “The problem is: what is the remedy? The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large.”
Joko’s language – from a collection first published in 1989 – isn’t a direct response to the rise of what Purser calls the “new capitalist spirituality.” But for me it works to douse some of the fire fueling such paradoxical grindset dharma. It’s helpful during such dark times as these when the reality seems to be that things are not just as bad as they seem, but likely worse, and with seemingly no help coming. It’s a practice that produces neither happiness, nor hope. For me, it results in acceptance, equanimity. It’s “non-self improvement,” i.e. taking a break from self-improvement in order to rest. And then return to effort.
Hope Against Hope
Learning the difference between hoping and helping as a black market medic in Far West Texas
“To do this practice, we have to give up hope,” Joko writes elsewhere in Everday Zen. “I mean that we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there's some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.
“When I say give up hope, I don't mean to give up effort,” she continues. “We have to sit with pain and we hate it. I don't like it either. But as we patiently just sit our way through that, something builds within us. . . It's not by anything we think, not by something we figure out in our heads. We're transformed by what we do. And what is it that we do? We constantly make that choice. We give up our ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are.”
David Graeber’s borderline optimistic anthropologically-informed take on impermanence works well with Joko’s advice on seeking equanimity. Not surprisingly, the anthropologist and anarchist activist’s language has been featured on ID Music broadcasts almost as often as Joko’s. This line is originally from 2015’s Utopia of Rules, but is perhaps more widely recognized as one of the first images in Adam Curtis’ 2021 documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
Like similarly pithy Zen aphorisms, it offers a profound paradigm shift in just a few words. And so it remains one of my last and most reliable safeguards against becoming fully black-pilled. His use of the word “differently” is one of the reasons I find the concept so helpful. It points to the core Buddhist concept of impermanence, the idea that nothing remains the same. This language is excerpted from a passage in Utopia of Rules that suggests what “effort” might look like as well. I’ve included the full text here, emphasis mine:
If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another . . . borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like “all power to the imagination” expresses the very quintessence of the Left.
From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?
Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore. This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?
The German anarchist Gustav Landauer had a similar idea in the early 20th Century when he wrote “the State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it be contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” If it works for you like it works for me, sitting meditation practice can be one method for learning to behave differently. Giving up our “ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are” allows us to drop our defenses, and let go of a desire to control our lives. In the quiet space left behind we have more room to imagine patience, kindness, and compassion. Enlightenment is waking up.
As Graeber would go on to write with David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “Our species has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.” Current illusory political dichotomies are yet another false binary that clouds our ability to “imagine and produce something else.” Without this sense of possibility, a grim assumption of inevitability sets in.
The oligarchy and its political enablers’ naked cruelty and contempt for kindness and compassion makes it easier to answer Graeber’s rhetorical question “who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?” The comfort here is that this world was not inevitable, but the coldness seeps in when we understand that it was produced to be this way with clear intention.
As is obvious and baffling to everyone that you and I know, the world’s allegedly richest human – and his cohort of openly fascist billionaires – could spend his life doing anything that humans can do. He could fulfill every medical crowdfunding campaign, live a life of luxury surrounded by his family and friends, or hook himself up to a ketamine IV and disappear completely into video games for the rest of his days. Instead he’s firing park rangers and weather forecasters, traumatizing post office workers, setting up concentration camps for immigrants, harassing trans children, and denying food, shelter, and medical care to the most vulnerable members of our society.
Peace and blessings to the right wing politicians and partisans who are having second thoughts about Trump, and the Tesla owners with buyer’s remorse, but Elon Musk has always1 been terrible, and dismantling the already meager US social safety net in order to usher in a libertarian dystopia of universal rent extraction and surveillance-based eugenics has been the aim of the right wing project since the end of World War II, if not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution2 in the 17th century. Dystopia may be utopia for the people running the dystopia.
Enforcing global capitalist hegemony by sowing death and discord around the world has been one of the primary US foreign policy goals at least since the Soviet Union accepted the Nazis’ surrender in 1945. And the tech oligarchy is only returning to Palo Alto’s foundational mission of “building better bombs and information systems for the military.”3 It’s only shocking because there’s no more pretense, even when it comes to the government and the oligarchy’s intention to use these weapons domestically.4 As one of the hosts of the Trash Future podcast summed it up on a recent episode: “The people who are most able to bring about the apocalypse simply by kicking away all of the supports of everyday life – this is a huge amount of what DOGE5 is doing – a lot of them are openly fantasizing about the apocalypse all the time.” This is the correct answer to Graeber’s question.
An apocalyptic ethnic cleansing of humanity is the common goal of Christian nationalists and Silicon Valley’s rationalist death cults. The idea that “it can’t happen here” is one of the greatest and most tragic expressions of American hubris. European fascists made “it” happen “there” using American6 blueprints. The policies of the Nazi regime were directly inspired by and modeled on Jim Crow and America’s immigration laws. This was here before. And they’ve been telling us this is coming back for a long time. This is life is at it is.
But Graeber’s not pointing to hope, nor telling us how long of a moral arc we have to endure before it bends toward justice, or at least flexes toward affordable health care. He’s talking about possibility. “Differently” could be better, or it could be worse. Gesturing back to Joko: “In the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.”
Joko’s cold but peaceful take on Zen says that we can rest in “life as it is,” regardless of whether we’re having a massive myocardial infarction, mundane heartache, or an ecstatic heart-opening experience. When combined with Graeber’s open-ended but still comforting optimism, I’m left with the ultimate hidden cold comfort: Life is as it is, but this wasn’t inevitable. Life can be made into something different. But we make change with effort and practice, not through communicating absolute knowledge with words. Regardless of whether our effort is sustained by hopeful daydreams or hopeless meditation, we start by behaving differently in our own lives.
Phew! Okay. Now to come down with a couple of recently archived Inter-Dimensional Music broadcasts that are free of heavy metals, consisting of mostly nice ‘n’ easy if not always bright ‘n’ sunny vibes. I’m also experimenting with Substack’s audio hosting, as it doesn’t seem like the Mixcloud page is very active and I find their interface to be annoying.
As always, you can find more from many of these artists in the ID Music Bandcamp library. If you end up buying something, perhaps let the artist know where you heard their sounds?
Vøid Contemplation Tactics is free to lurkers and free subscribers alike, but the generosity of paid subscribers gets passed on to the musicians you hear on our airwaves: Thank you.
ID MUSIC 2025.01.11: Flujo Puro
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It’s the first 2025 installment of Pure Flow, our intermittent experiment in imagining an ID Music that offers more dharma rock, with less dharma talk. Sit together with us for an uninterrupted hour of long-form acoustic psychedelia and mesmerizing kosmische drones from Gnod, Agate Flow, Haress, and CAN.
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with vintage cassette-tape earth psych in the form of Illuminated Offerings from Deep Magic.
artist – work
Deep Magic - Illuminated Offerings (edit)
Gnod - Peace at Home
Agate Flow - Gentle
Haress - Litres Into Metres / Susurrus
CAN - Zwei (Keele 1977)
Deep Magic - Illuminated Offerings (edit)
ID MUSIC 2025.02.23: Ordinary Life is The Way
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For this week's practice, we'll sit with Leslie Keffer and Nyoka Shoje’s collaborative naturewave drift, a slightly sinister wetlands pastorale oriented toward the sounds of dusk and twilight. From there, we move into meditational nyabinghi riddim and voicing from A. Doeman, Ras Michael, Lloyd "Bullwackie" Barnes, and the Roots Radics Band. We prepare to return to the provisional realm of names and forms with Strategy's box-fresh ambient electronics that “rest in stillness beneath a blanket of snow.”
Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with celestial drones recorded live in a gothic church from Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.
Language throughout the broadcast from Joko Beck on how to have an ordinary OK kind of day, regardless of the season.
artist – work
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri - Live at Le Guess Who? (edit)
Leslie Keffer + Nyoka Shoje - Bayou Version
A. Doeman - What A Dreadful Set Of Them & Version
Strategy - The Rabbit Hole
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri - Live at Le Guess Who? (edit)
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blessing up and blessing down,
DC
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“We’ve often said that Jeffrey Epstein offers us a lens through which to view larger networks of power and influence and ways to ascertain how they operate and impact the world. The story of Tesla Motors offers us the same opportunity: how a nerdy dot-com gold chaser hacked the self-satisfied neoliberal green political regime and orchestrated a cacophonous symphony of thirsty social media marketeers, auto industry executives, captured and bought off media, and the bull market ride of the century.”
For more on this topic do yourself a favor and read Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity or at least listen to her in conversation with Tech Won’t Save Us. It’s very hopeful and inspiring!
Language from a discussion of Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto on “Bastards of Doge,” a recent episode of the Trash Future podcast.
More ideas paraphrased from Trash Future and “Bastards of Doge.” It’s a good episode!
Please stop saying “doh-juh.” DOGE is pronounced “doggy.”
The policies of the Nazi regime were directly inspired by and modeled on American law. In a 2017 interview with Bill Moyers, James Q. Whitman – the author of Hitler’s American Model – puts it like this:
“American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state. America was the leader in a whole variety of realms in racist law in the first part of that century. Some of this involved American immigration law, which was designed to exclude so-called ‘undesirable races’ from immigration. In 1924 American immigration law in particular was praised by Hitler himself, in his book Mein Kampf.
“But it wasn’t just about American immigration law. There was also American law creating forms of second-class citizenship — for African-Americans, of course, but also for other populations including Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Not least, there were statutes in 30 American states forbidding and sometimes criminalizing interracial marriage. Those were of special interest to the Nazis.”
1) As always, I needed to read this.
2) Jim Anchower intro? You're speaking the true language of the people.