Robin. He’s a hood. In the true, old, exotic… absolutely crucial senses. And I need some, every day.

In my opinion, (t)his is one of the most powerful and profound voices I have ecountered on facebook. Beyond all worldly treasure. Beyond all mortal measure. Deep in wisdom, deeper pleasure.

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“People are always telling me “there’s no going back.” The “onward only” mantra is thick, insidious, and defeatist. Despite the ground-breaking work done sociologically, anthropologically, scientifically and (most important) spiritually- in discovering who and what we are as humans, what we really are, and how maladapted we are to our current range of social pressures and experiences, the defeated souls in many people shrug their shoulders and suggest that we just soldier on with the great curse that bedevils us all. Forget that our “ways forward” are hopeless and self-defeating; forget that a wealth of evidence displays how there is no true way forward the way we’ve been going- there’s just “no going back” is all people say.

To them, I say “Who said anything about going back?” I never suggested an epic, ten-thousand mile return to something we lost way back in the dim places; I suggest that we’ve not gone so far away from what’s important as we think. I wish to communicate- and have experienced for myself- that we are not so alienated from the core of what’s important as many want us to believe we are.

With just a simple shift of how I use my senses, I’ve experienced things that would astound, confuse, and terrify many. But those things have become the cornerstones of a worldview that endows me with immense peace and insight. With a simple willingness to open my mind and heart, the sentient bulk of life and substance in this world has shown its willingness to be not just friendly, but allies in the lonely struggle of this soul. This should tell us all something important- that the brief time (all things considered) that has passed since humans started acting barking mad against one another and this world hasn’t damaged us as deeply as we imagine.

Despite the large amounts of damage we’ve seen, the optimistic truth is that this isn’t as lost a cause as we imagine. Not on every level, anyway.

I’m a wordy, imaginative person, clever at times, but I’m as human as the next person, as hurt and cut off by this modern world as the next person, and the techniques and things I’ve used to explore my capacities of consciousness and awareness can be done by any. It’s not some rare sage that has the power to “see” the most important things; it is humanity that has that power, all of us. I really believe that. Most of us won’t do this not because of some innate flaw, but because of pernicious conditioning that has robbed most people of their belief in their own connection and capabilities. And if they really are so stuck in disbelief, then they truly will not be able to reach the depths of themselves, no matter what.

I don’t often bring things down to belief, and while this situation is slightly more complex than just mere belief, belief still plays a huge role. What seems like a mighty blizzard that we are fighting through isn’t as long and cold as we imagine. Fear itself can get in our way quite decisively, even if it isn’t based on anything real.

So why go back to what I never left? No one thinks that they’ve left home just because they’ve backed to the end of their driveway or walked ten paces away from their door. You’ve “left” when you’re well underway, and miles are passing by. We are still in sight of the door of our homes. I think we’re just afraid to walk back, mostly because our flawed sense of “progress” stands in our way. But what is this “path mystical” if not a great study of the return to sources, to beginnings, to homes for the soul? Every wisdom tradition known speaks of uniting us with our sources- like the salmon leaping back upstream, the return is crucial to what comes next. No wisdom tradition worth the name considers the source to be unimportant, and focuses only on “progress” (whatever that means)- they all strive to make the circular path of souls complete by uniting all that has happened with all that is happening.

Even the most shallow modern emanations of attempts at mystical religion all start there- returning to one’s source, whether it be some great Goddess or some divine wellspring that masquerades under another name- even the great “luminous voidness” of the awakened nature, for those paths that do not position a personal theistic source for things at the beginning. There is a deeply implanted knowledge in everyone- or nearly everyone- that “going back” is key, that re-acquiring an understanding of where we came from is the most important pre-requisite for understanding where we’re going, and getting there safely.

People tell me “there’s no going back!” But I must insist that “There’s no going forward in truth unless we do go back, at least in our understanding, and know what this journey is really all about to begin with.”

To make a further example, I’m not “going back” to eating the Ancestral diet- a choice I made for myself. Our bodies are not so different from the bodies of humans from 20,000 years ago. I do not buy into the claims that we magically underwent some massively rapid biological evolution in the last 7,000 years of eating a lot of grains, anymore than I buy into the claims that 1700 years (1000 years, in some places) of monotheism has somehow altered the souls of Europeans and other native peoples around the world, making Islam or Christianity now something they’ve adapted to and can accept and gain great comfort and peace from.

I’m not taking my body “back” to a time in the distant past; I’m just giving it what millions of years of evolution has made it able to process well. When I meet with the spirits who are my allies and helpers, and pray to the great spirits that my Ancestors might have rightly called “Gods”, I’m not taking my soul back to a distant time; I’m giving my soul what every previous moment of its existence gave to it, before _one_ single cultural scourge came along to steal from it just a handful of centuries ago- and my soul reacts as well to that as my body does to the healthy proteins, fruits, nuts, and vegetables that I give it.

And still, I’m told by countless people that I’m being a fool, that “there is no going back.” We always want to find ways to justify recently-normalized habitual behaviors and cultural patterns, despite the great pain they cause us and the world, because that’s just how the inertia of very large societies seems to work. The flow is so strong that people instinctively avoid moving against it.

But not all people. And those strange “salmon” among you who leap against the river’s course, to find the source, you are revealing the underlying truth: the old days and the old ways aren’t so dead as others have wanted us to think.”

— Robin Artisson