What Does it All Mean?

Ceremony v. the Progress Narrative

Ten years ago I ran into this beautiful woman at Logan's Coffeeshop in Boulder, and my life would never be the same. Five years later, on the same day, I proposed to her. Five more years to the day — last Saturday — we celebrated ten years together.

I never thought I'd find a soul mate who I connected with so deeply, who I could laugh with so freely, who shared my love of consciousness and the dharma, and who had so much to teach me in the way of relational and body wisdom.

As I said to her in the first months of our relationship: "I don't see how this ends."

In order for me to meaningfully say “I don’t see how this ends” — then and now — I actually have to regularly ask myself how it might end. That means investigating whether the relationship is still serving me, and more importantly, my vows.

We’ve gone through a hell of a lot together in the last ten years — health issues, financial challenges, legal battles — while seeking to serve our commitments to loved ones, students, the dharma.

At a certain level I’ve welcomed the challenges because they have kept me from becoming complacent, from going on auto-pilot in any area of my life. (Which I definitely have a tendency to do.) I can honestly say that I have not been bored for ten years. I have forgotten what boredom feels like!

I’ve been thinking a lot about ceremonies…. how important it is that we regularly recognize and appreciate the things that are most important to us. To regularly re-affirm our intentions and aspirations in all areas of our life: self, relationships and work.

We need to do this on the personal level with our own health and breath, on the relational level with our important relationships, on the communal level with our meaningful social/cultural values, and on the vocational level with our professional milestones.

Zen is built around repetitive practices that effect a deepening of our quality of presence. When we pay deep attention to our breathing, eating, walking, feeling, waking, moving and even thinking, the sacred dimension of human life opens up. It happens quite naturally. We don’t need to force it.

From this place, we can discover the meaning of our lives. And from this place we can ask ourselves about our jobs and our relationships: “when does this end?, is it time for this to end?”

As an aside: ritual repetition is most powerful when connected to natural time cycles: days, months, seasons, years, and, at the most intimate level, breaths and hunger cycles. When our attention is focused on the artificial time cycles — seconds, hours, weeks, and arbitrary work milestones — we feel a diminished sense of meaning and a diminished quality of Being. This is one reason why most of our work environments, which are tied most strongly to the hour and the week, can feel distressingly superficial and meaningless.

For those experiencing abrupt and often conscienceless work transitions — as are so many across the federal, tech, pharma and many other workforces — it is helpful to re-ground yourself in what is essentially meaningful in your life: through breath meditation, simple somatic practices, intimate connection (preferably over food!) with close friends and partners, and a reclaiming of what has inspired your work. If you find that you have not been inspired in your work, then there might be a silver lining to the break.

Our political sphere right now is dominated by a mindset that denies the importance of ceremony, that seeks to assume for itself the power of ritual repetition. Talk of kings and dictators, the abolition of standards of democracy that ritually re-enact the granting and withdrawal of power, the abrupt termination of tens of thousands of careers that have had their own path and cycles…. it is all, ironically, deeply coercive and disempowering to our collective.

Technology plays a big part in the social dimension of this movement. The technology narrative is one of constant innovation, disruption of older forms, and progress toward greater and more powerful capabilities. But technology is itself values-free. It celebrates nothing.

Or perhaps it celebrates Nothing.

In terms of the Being-Relating-Doing structure, technology is all about Doing. I consider verbally-based conceptual thinking a kind of Doing. The kind of “thinking” that AI performs — unreflective, pattern-matching verbal forms — is not thinking in the deepest sense, a thinking that is informed by lived bodily experience and animated by an intuitive connection to higher consciousness.

Now I am not a Luddite, or even a “techno-pessimist,” to use a helpful new term. I spent most of my professional career in technology, co-founding three tech startups. I am more excited than scared by AI (to the absolute dismay of Aria and others.)

A realistic viewpoint that I try to adopt sees technology as a values-free force-multiplier for whatever intention informs its use. From this standpoint I believe it is realistic to expect that when Big Tech barons join forces with a proto-dictator, the outcome may be something like techno-feudalism.

This is something to be properly terrified of, but I believe the best response is to discover, or re-discover, or re-affirm, and then put in practice and shout it on the mountain ….. what is most deeply meaningful and valuable to us.

This is why ceremonies and anniversaries are so important. They remind us of our intentions and our deepest vows.

They are not “backward-looking” in a nostalgic sense. They are a recognition of the formative forces in the present that brought us to this place. They are an acknowledgement and a renewal of what is meaningful in our lives, an essential motivating factor for leading a fulfilling life.