The Rituals of The Spirit

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

David R. Hawkins

In the episode of Family Guy titled First Blood, Peter and the guy’s visit Mayor West’s dude ranch to become cowboys and develop their physical prowess. And what would a cowboy be without a horse? Just a man. One of the first things the men do is to get a horse. Peter excitedly attempts to pick a horse and Mayor West, in his deep sonorous voice, holds him back, “Hold on Peter,” West says. “Real cowboys don’t choose their horse; the horse chooses them.” It wouldn’t be Family Guy if any of the horses actually chose Peter. This theme runs throughout their entire stay at the ranch, “real cowboys don’t choose their cattle, the cattle choose them…” While Peter is repeatedly and hilariously rejected by every living thing on the ranch, there is something worth staying with in this theme beyond the humour. It reminds me of the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. The rather facially expressive hat reads the energy or spirit of the person wearing the hat and decides which house they would be best suited to. Bottom line is that while we may think that we choose things, it is things that first choose us. I think this applies to all matter, from horses, dogs, and people, to places, cars, and books. 

I was browsing through books online and The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth immediately grabbed my attention; and I am currently elbows and knees deep into it. I wasn’t even looking for a book on money, but the book chose me and that was that. There was something in me, immaterial, that the book identified and found resonance with. As I read this book, the idea that “everything is energy” concretized in my mind. Our eyes, which take up a lot of brain bandwidth, mislead us, they give us the impression that what we see is all there is to reality. If this weren’t the case, we would not be so enamoured with material possessions. While the things we see with our eyes are seductive, they are only one part of the story, a very small one. They are more at the tail end of the story arc of reality rather than being front and centre. They are the culmination and manifestation, the end-product of things that we cannot see. They are the tip of the iceberg.  

Many people have interpreted Joseph Campbell’s The Hero's Journey in many different ways and in her book, Nemeth explores the journey “energetically.” For her, a hero goes through the journey of taking nameless energy that we all have access to as human beings and channelling it with principles, converting it with our own standards of integrity and shaping it with intentions into goals realized. While her book is focused on money, Nemeth does note that this process applies to all aspects of our lives. Money is a form of energy, so is physical vitality, time, enjoyment, creativity and support. These can all be tapped into to help us realize our goals, or to actually help us live fulfilling lives. Campbell himself wrote that “Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life’s possibilities.” Substitute money for any of the other types of energy and the quote still rings true. Physicist David Bohm put it emphatically when he said that how we do money is how we do life. 

This brings to mind an episode of Insecure (S02E01) when Issa Dee (Issa Rae) provides Molly (Yvonne Orji) a simple one-sentence description on the state of affairs that is her life. “D on E, bank account on E, life on E.” I repeat, how we do money, is how we do life.   

In Like Stories of Old, the brilliant Tom van der Linden shares a video titled Life is not a Hero’s Journey where he presents a cinematically compelling argument on how stories and reality are different and that when we try to cut out our lives along the dotted line of the hero’s journey, the end results, for most of us, are cripplingly disappointing. While I agree with everything he says macroscopically, I see it a little bit differently microscopically. What I mean by this is that while our entire lives may not be a hero’s journey, our everyday lives, on the ground, may present little adventures of heroism. Like when you left the safety of your small town with its clean air and endless forests, went to a university in a big, crowded city and sweated your way through your business degree, slaying dragons like Economics 200 and clinging to your books in a desperate attempt not to get pulled into the party-life vortex, in the process. That in itself is a hero’s journey. When we look at it energetically, you took a form of energy, a matric certificate, and turned it into a degree which has opened up a lot of opportunities for you. Anytime you’ve gone from not having something, to having it or even going from being a shitty person to a not-so shitty person then you are manipulating energy. Even slay queens (baddies) are manipulating energy, they are using money to purchase slayness (and all its accoutrements) which eventually gets them ‘the bag.’ Sebenza girl!!! I’ll go later into details of why I think this type of energy manipulation is limited. No judgments, just observations. All in all, we all participate, knowingly and unknowingly in The Hero’s Journey. “Successful people know how energy works. They know how to focus the various kinds of energy to convert their ideas into dreams, and visions into reality,” writes Nemeth. 

Because most of us are unaware of our “energetic potentiation” ability, we equally, but with more insidious effects, are unaware of all the ways that we lose energy. We trifle it away. We may set the goal and intention with internal vats full of energy but by the time we engage in the action that we need to, to alchemize our dreams; we are working with only a marginal percent of the energy we set off on our paths with. In this essay, I look at the ways that I have seen people, me included, give away our energetic power. Interestingly, I use a lot of van der Linden’s points to make my case. Hopefully, on the other side of this, you will be acutely aware of how you are siphoning away unused energy. You will walk away singing AKA’s (We miss you) Energy, operating at the peak of your energy like Tony Montana.   

Because Crips!

My knowledge of Hip Hop is pretty suspect; therefore, I was not surprised when a Hip Hop artist, who has been in the business for more than 15 years, has gone undetected by my radar this whole time. Regardless, I know who he is now (courtesy of the Brilliant Idiots podcast) and the internet being what it is, gave me the ability to transport myself back in digital time. For the past two weeks, I have been consuming as much content as possible on Glasses Malone. What a breath of fresh air this guy is. Firstly, Glasses is this clean, goodlooking, articulate guy who is also a ‘gang banger.’ He is proudly part of the Crips, which is weird for me. He just does not fit into the image of what a gang member looks like or speaks like. Please excuse my ignorance! You guys know that Hollywood shows us what it chooses to show us and when we are kids, we are none the wiser to the actual truth. Take this for an example: When we were growing up, we believed that all African Americans were beautiful. From Sister Sister to One on One and even Girlfriends, we just saw all sorts of beauty. It was only in 1998 when a new channel called e.tv fizzled its way onto our Panasonic 14’’ screens when our views changed. e.tv introduced us to Ricki Lake which shattered our minds because that’s when we saw what the normal African American look like. I remember it like it was yesterday. A little bit of my childhood died on that day. 

This is obviously similar to how a lot of Americans developed a skewed view of Africa and Africans because of films like Coming to America. Most Americans have evolved out of this atavistic view, but some Americans (i.e. #MeekMill) have a way to go, even after exports like Trevor Noah and Elon Musk. Still laughing at some of those tweets from Meek’s social media excoriation. So funny. 

In light of my own ignorance, I took to educating myself, privately and not on X, on what ‘gangbanging’ actually means. Glasses is blisteringly honest which makes him a contentious figure but personally, I think most of his views are well informed and true. He is one of those rare figures who say what they mean and mean what they say… which is quite refreshing. With cancel culture and people’s deep-seated need to stay relevant or publicly validated, it is just rare to find people who tell it like it is. Above all else, what makes Glasses stand out most to me is that he has a code of conduct, standards by which he lives by and does not deviate from. This code of conduct is based on him being a crip. He has a clear picture of what it means to be a man and lives according to these rules. The crips were formed in the 60’s and their definition of what it means to be a man is completely different from what it means to be a man in today’s society. Masculinity has taken so many hits in modern day society, that it is just plain difficult for men to fully participate in society while fully embracing their masculinity. In an attempt to deal with the toxic elements of masculinity, we have gone too far in the other direction; we have effectively socially castrated masculinity in most, if not all, of its ways. 

In the Home-Grown Radio podcast, Glasses is asked what he is afraid of? While most of us expect a hyper-masculine ‘nothing’ response, he starts listing off a number of things that he is afraid of, including flying and surgery. Then he says that because he is a crip, he still does these things, he doesn’t let his fear dictate his actions. During the podcast, co-host Chuck Dizzle shares an anecdote of how they once had an appearance to make, and Glasses had mistakenly underdressed for the weather. To Glasses, there was no question of whether he would make the appearance or not, he would just have to suffer the weather. You know why? Because Crips! All his actions are based on solid principles which develop him as a person and a man. As he grows, he evolves into the best version of himself. For how many people can this be said? 

To say that most of us have a flexible moral fibre is an understatement. We let social media decide what’s right or wrong, good or bad for us. We are always trying to be on the right side of public discourse, even if that hurts or stifles our personhood. We jump on censorship bandwagons, participate in modern-day witch trials, commercialize other people’s loneliness through apps like Only Fans. It’s a lot. While we cannot return to simpler WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) days, when we do not have principles which undergird our actions, then we are most likely operating inauthentically, and wasting precious energy trying to justify our inauthentic actions. Imagine the energy it takes to wake up each morning and have to consult the social media oracle to tell us what is right for us today. Anytime we spend any time worrying about how we will be perceived by strangers is a colossal waste of energy. This goes for the energy-taxing need to maintain our public personas. 

Performance psychologist, Michael Gervais, writes in The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You: 

Our fear of people’s opinions (FOPO) is a hidden epidemic and may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential. Our concern with what other people think about us has become an irrational, unproductive, and unhealthy obsession in the modern world. And its negative effects reach into all aspects of our lives. When we experience FOPO, we lose faith in ourselves, and our performance suffers. That’s human nature. But, if we’re not careful, FOPO can take over the narrative in our minds, slowly poisoning us. Instead of focusing on our own thoughts and feelings, we start obsessing about the thoughts and opinions of others, whether spoken or perceived, and this obsession can affect our decisions and actions. And our lives. 

When we have principles which we base our lives upon, then other people’s opinions become a non-factor. Most of us weren’t raised by wolves, therefore there is a likelihood that we used to have standards of integrity that we have wavered from. In the unfortunate case where you were raised by wolves, which happens, because procreation is a biological drive and not a psychological one; there are people around you who had character traits that you admired and looked up to. Like the old lady who used to live next door to you who would always invite you over for cookies or the bus driver who was as dignified as ever when school kids would be disrespectful and rude towards him. Even tv and books offer countless examples of people who are living authentically and whose authenticity has sparked something within us. These are our standards of integrity. They project our highest selves on the ceilings of our reality and help us live in alignment to those selves narrowing the aperture of our energy and focusing it on ways that are beneficial to us. 

“I Need Closure, Bro!” 

These iconic words came from Sammi Sweetheart from Jersey Shore. Yes, I watched the first few seasons of Jersey Shore. It’s true. I know. Anyway, during one of their epic fights in their category 10 disaster of a relationship, when the other housemates were so fed up with all the fighting, she prods Ronnie, with an “I need closure, bro!” He proceeds to give her the closure she wants in the harshest way possible, and she ends up crying. 

Tom van der Linden says that we set ourselves up for disappointment when we look at our lives as stories because stories have a beginning and an end. They wrap themselves up very neatly with a red bow. It is happily ever after and so forth. Stories have closure, most of the time life does not. People just die. People can die when their life is only just beginning, a day after getting married, or as Alanis Morrisette puts it in Ironic, win the lottery and die the next day. They can also die when they are a hundred years old with a lot of their affairs still not in order. Life does not give us closure; it gives us death. More often than not, death is not a period, it's a question mark of confusion or an exclamation mark of shock. A proverbial whimper and not a bang. The need for closure is an energy drain, in that it is a distraction. Especially when it comes to making sense of other people’s actions. We can create entire dramas in our heads trying to interpret why people do the things they do to us, at the end of which bring us no closer to our goals. The first time I realized that closure was bull, was when I, as a female African living in this country with its unsavoury past and a presence peppered with systemic contradictions, became conscious. It was then I understood what Audre Lorde had meant when she wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ I knew that I could not look for equality from the very people who bred and yoked us with such racking inequality. This applies to everything else. 

Let’s return to those of us with lupine ancestry whose childhoods can be summed up with one word: trauma. Trauma exists and it can really do a number on us. We have been led to believe that we need closure on our trauma to be able to carry on with our lives, but I don’t think so. Therapy and trauma work is there to help remove barriers that impede our progress and prevent us from engaging in self-sabotaging behaviours, it is not there to help us find closure. Your dad could have gone out to buy some milk when you were younger and we know how that sorry tale goes, or even recently, your whole wife, whom you love more than anything, conjured and materialized a blindside of a divorce out of thin air. Shitty debilitating things like these happen but you actually don’t need to hunt your dad down or cyber stalk your now ex-wife to find answers. For the former, what if your dad is dead or still wants nothing to do with you? For the latter, nothing your now ex-wife says to justify her actions will make an iota of sense to you. Seeking closure can be an unsatisfactory endeavour and leave you worse off than before you sought it out. Poet Rupi Kaur reminds us, ‘do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you,’ 

Author Nancy Berns unpacks closure in her book Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What it Costs Us:

From bad relationships to terrorist attacks, the concept of closure enters the cultural debate about how to respond when traumatic things happen… Closure has become a new emotion for explaining what we need after trauma and loss and how we should respond… When I argue that closure is a new emotion, I am not claiming that people are experiencing some feelings that were never felt before, such as the experience of grief lessening. I am arguing that there is a new way of thinking about and talking about emotions… People have felt grief and may have wished that it would end, but ‘closure’ is a new term and new way of thinking and acting on this grief. Our grandparents did not seek closure after the death of a loved one. Closure is a state that people want to bring about in themselves and in others… It has resulted in new products, rituals, experts, strategies and ways of seeing the world.

 

Berns explains how closure represents a part of society’s feeling rules which tell us how we should react in certain situations. We are expected to seek closure even when it is particularly harmful to us. Rituals like divorce parties are widely accepted even though they don’t make sense. Seeking revenge, which is personally destructive behaviour because it drives you to act inauthentically, is also seen as a form of closure. Wild. 

Life is messy and has various interruptions, beginnings, failings, partial endings etc. We can still proceed to carve a path for ourselves in the midst of the chaos and uncertainty. We don’t have to wait for the conditions to be “right” (including finding or receiving closure), or for the path to be paved, before we take action.

Solo Hero

Does the name Tenzing Norgay mean anything to you? What about the name Sir Edmund Hillary? Most of us know who Sir Edmund Hillary is. He is the first mountaineer to be confirmed to have climbed Mt. Everest. Except… Hillary was not alone. If you are familiar with how climbing Mt. Everest works, you would know that people climb the mountain with a sherpa. A sherpa is a local guide who is familiar with the terrain, whose presence increases the likelihood of a successful summit and plain old survival. Hillary was one of two people who first summited Everest.

There has always been a glorification of the lone hero who overcomes herculean obstacles by himself. From John Wayne to James Bond to Bruce Wayne, our heroes are lone figures, and occidentally of the ‘straight, white, male’ persuasion. This is a product of western individualization and Hollywood but if we take a wider perspective of heroism, we see a different story. I was reading up on Japanese mythology and the creation story in Japanese mythology is collaborative. The kami (gods) are pluralistic, and they created two gods (Izanagi and Izanami) who then lassoed the chaos and gave it form and purpose. Even in the monotheistic creation story of Christianity, there is a collaboration marked by the Holy Trinity. The language that is used in Genesis belies the idea of a single creative entity. “Let us make man in our own image,” it reads. There is no one-man-show, and we suffer greatly if we try to do things alone. There have always been leaders, Shaka, Leonidas, Genghis Khan, Jocko Willink, who can only be emphasized because they are pronounced against a background of other warriors. They were able to lead because they had men who were willing to join their cause. They were not swimming in a dry sea. They were not alone. They were not renegades and any or all victories could not have happened without these men. 

When Jesus was captured by the Romans, just before his crucifixion, there was a legion of angels waiting in the wings who would have come to rescue him if Jesus had asked them to. He was not alone. Even in the loneliness that enveloped him when all his disciples were asleep when they should have been praying, he was not alone. On the cross, being stripped of life slowly by asphyxiation, he was not alone. When he felt forsaken, he was not alone. There is something to be said here. When we are faced with great challenges, we may be tempted to respond by isolating ourselves from others, severing the umbilical cord of the support that will help us keep in sync with ourselves and others. When the Buddhists wrote that we all suffer, this wasn’t meant to make us compare our sufferings with one another’s. What I mean by this is that we are told to keep it together under challenges because other people have bigger problems to deal with, that our problems are ‘first world’ problems. All suffering is real to the people who are experiencing it regardless of what the challenge before them is. By knowing that we all suffer, means that we are comrades in life. We can reach out to others because even though they may not have experienced the exact challenge that we are facing, they know what suffering is. Those who love you and are for you, will help you in various ways through your suffering. This is not where you withdraw, this is where you draw ever so closer to your community. This is something I personally struggle with, and I’ve struggled with it because of my previous assumptions (limiting beliefs) about other people. For the most part, people have proved me wrong rather than right. It still surprises me. Your people are for you and your dreams, they are on your side, and they want you to succeed and if you reach out, they will take your hand. Shout out to Ous Sannie Ncube, thank you for being one of my people. Even if, in your most valiant ways, you manage to overcome the challenges without asking anyone else for help, your victory is pyrrhic. The energy that you used up to get yourself to the other side of the challenge was so much that you don’t have any energy for the next leg of the race. This is called living life on hard mode and losing sight of the overall objective. The objective is not to do it alone, it is to achieve the goal. Doing it all by yourself is a path, it is not a destination, and paths can easily be discarded if they lead to dead-ends or in this case, pyrrhic victories.  

Bruce Daisley wrote the book Fortitude which flips everything we know about resilience on his head. Resilience, like self-esteem and closure, are new ideas. They haven’t been there all along. I introduce self-esteem into this list because feeling good or bad about yourself is a distraction, it is an energy-wasting preoccupation. It makes you turn away from what it is that you are supposed to be doing and makes you turn to yourself. I can’t imagine people from primordial tribes spending any time on self-esteem. Everybody in a tribe has a role to play and you just do what you are meant to do, you contribute in the way you are supposed to. You go about your day without having to ask yourself how you feel about yourself. There is obviously a time for reflection on actions, but this can be done without venturing near the perilous cliffs of “how do I feel about myself?”  Even when you do something that goes against one of your standards of integrity or principles, you can rectify the action without drowning in the weeds of feeling bad about yourself. The opposite applies by the way; you can do good and achieve all manner of exceptional achievements without having an inflated sense of self. Just yesterday, YouTube’s Tom Bilyeu shared this on his YouTube community, “Build your self-esteem around your willingness to acknowledge your inadequacies in service of constant improvement. Sounds obvious, but most people build their self-esteem around being right. That’s the recipe for a small life of constant insecurity.” You don’t need self-esteem to improve upon your inadequacies, you just need a willingness to do so.  

A similar case can be made for resilience. When the external environment becomes unbearably hard, the individual is expected to take personal responsibility for their inability to deal with the environment. If you work in a stressful environment and you become stressed (shocking!) from working in said environment, you are completely to blame for your inability to cope with the environment. You don’t have resilience and it is your fault. From what I hear, corporate South Africa is a caustic environment for black professionals. There are many who succumb and leave it altogether, and there are those who soldier on but who pay a heavy price for doing so. The suited soldiers are seen as resilient even if they are underpaid, overworked, overlooked, tolerated, undermined etc…There is also a systemically ingrained practice where black people view other black people in the same position as adversaries instead of allies, which leads to the isolation I referred to earlier. When you suffer by yourself in such hostile environments, it is only a matter of time before you break. 

Sure, resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, but according to Daisley, this definition is incomplete. It is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, not as an individual, but with the help of others. The black professionals who are able to stay in corporate South Africa and flourish are well connected with other black professionals. They have overcome their inclinations to avoid other black people and have formed a corporate coalition. They have drawn strength from one another. It is not surprising that the group of people who have overcome apartheid in South Africa the best is the most collaborative and supportive (of each other). These are people who have not just concentrated on self-interest but on the interests of the entire group. Resilience is not an individual responsibility; it is cultivated within the context of a community. 

Rebecca Solnit wrote A Paradise Built in Hell where she studied how people respond in the aftermath of natural disasters.  “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones,” she found. This is resilience at work, being fashioned and fashioning us in turn. We don’t have to wait until hell’s fires incinerate our front doors to create these paradises, we can do so right now. We can surround ourselves with people who embody the values we admire and have our energies restored by others as we do our part to restore the energies of others as well. 

Anytime you watch a Lifetime movie, you are reminded that there are actually people who don’t have the same values as you do, and unfortunately, nowadays, these people roll in mobs. There are people who actively seek to destroy the accomplishments of other people, to drain them of their energy. These people take a shot of spite for breakfast and are satisfied with themselves when they lie down to the ashes of other people’s hard work. These are trolls, bullies, racists etc. The people who think it is their duty to put other people in their place. The ‘ok’salayo’ (the fact remains) people who maliciously and with impunity tear down others and when the light of accountability is shone in their direction, all they can say is that the fact remains that they did it. These are energies we must not, in any capacity, entertain. ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists!’. We do not read their comments, and if we do have to read them, we do not reply. We do not argue with them. We do not play their games. We don’t complain about them. We don’t harbour grudges. We keep it moving. 

In South Africa, people use the threat of violence to deal with envy. Let them. People know if they can make you feel afraid, you will spend all your time nursing that fear. Nah, fam. That is no way to live. The late Kobe Bryant said two things which I hold close to my heart, personally, in the face of this type of energy. “Boos don't stop dunks.” Stay focused on your goals. “We don’t quit. We don’t cower. We don’t run away. We endure and we conquer.” It really is as simple as that. Even when people have to resort to taking your life when confronted with your success, freedom or joyful living (yes it happens) as Rick Jade puts it in Still, “you can try to take my life, but you can’t take my skill.” Jacob Banks has a song titled Unholy War and he introduces the song with the following words. “They will come for you/ They will come for your magic/ They will come because your heart glows in the dark/ Because you are familiar but not the same/ Because there is love in your throat…/ So put your dreams in your front pocket/ Use the ones before you as ankle weights/ And raise the sun… Freedom is on the move.” Qualify your support; make sure your garden is free of ankle-biting snakes. 

According to legend, a vampire cannot simply cross the threshold of the doorframe of a house, it has to be invited in. Once it’s been invited in, then it feeds off the inhabitants of the house, leaving them for dead. This is the first rule to deal with energy vampires, never invite them in. And if you have to interact with these vampires, perhaps you work with them or you live next-door to them, protect your spirit by garlanding yourself with the garlic of courage, adorning yourself with silver bijoux of enthusiasm and vitality for your life and spill the rice of a life well lived on the floor of existence and leave them counting the steps of your movements while you rush headlong into your goals, anchored by your people.  

Chekhov's Gun

Another reason why our lives are not stories, according to van der Linden, is because of the narrative principle known as Chekhov’s Gun. In a film, every element that is introduced has to have a purpose. It has to be necessary to the unfolding of the story. If we were to look at our lives, they are littered with Chekhov’s Guns. There are so many things that we do daily, that are Chekhov’s Guns, mostly driven by our need to be entertained. We see entertainment as such a benign endeavour, and also a necessary component to life. We can hardly imagine a life without entertainment. The food we eat used to be fuel, but now it is entertainment. Our romantic relationships and friendships are entertainment. How we raise our children and keep our families is entertainment. The way we make a living is entertainment. The way we spend our discretionary time is entertainment. What we wear and where we go is entertainment. Basically, so much of the way we spend our time is rooted in a desire to be entertained or to entertain. A camera, used to serve the purpose of capturing important moments in life, is now synonymous with content. When Kurt Cobain loudly yelled, “Here we are now! Entertain us!” in Smells Like Teen Spirit, he was encapsulating the spirit of our times: entertainment culture. We have reduced everything into entertainment, and the premise of the interactions we have with one another is based on our ability to entertain each other. Men entertain women with their resources and women entertain men with their bodies. “Where is the love?” ask The Black Eyed Peas. And we wonder why the culture is obsessed with talk around ‘body counts.’ Naturally, if entertainment is the name of the game, relationships become a churn. “Show me a beautiful woman, and I will show you a man who is tired of sleeping with her,” Gina (Clea Lewis) says in Perfect Stranger. When we see each other through the lens of entertainment, boredom becomes inevitable. Entertainment and boredom are two sides of the same coin. 

We view entertainment in such an innocuous light, and we associate it with innocent words like ‘leisure’ and ‘recreation.’ Words that evoke images of souvenir shop postcards, white sandy beaches, glimmering sunsets, and pina coladas. The word ‘entertainment’ should make you think of the wild man in the Bible who when Jesus asked him what his name is, replied “My name is Legion; for we are many.” There are many ways that entertainment shows up in our lives and it produces the same self-destructive behaviour that the demons produced in this man. He was cutting himself up with stones. Our self-harm comes in numbing ourselves, dehumanizing each other, allowing for the usurpation of the most important things in life like love and diverting all our attention from our goals. Entertainment attacks all our energies. It doesn’t just drain us of our money and time, it attacks our physical, creative and supportive energies. Even our ability to enjoy things is compromised by entertainment because when we are hopping from one entertainment medium to another, we are courting restlessness and a boredom that will foster an enjoyment that has one eye on the current thing and the other eye on the next thing. 

Earlier in the essay, I touched on why the whole slay queen outbreak thing is limited in its ability to manipulate energy. It is a symptom of entertainment and is super self-absorbed. As with entertainment, it is all about ‘me.’ It has a rapacious self-interest. It is all about what I can get, it has no consideration for the other. It is transactional and it only gives so that it can take later. It is not just a manipulation of energy, but it is manipulative in its energy which makes it limited. It is unsustainable and only works for a little while. Nemeth writes that when we give with an expectation of return then we are setting ourselves up for anger and pessimism. When these methods don’t work anymore, then we will become angry and pessimistic. When it comes to other people, contribution is the name of the game. When we use our energy to serve others, then we rejuvenate ourselves in the process without needing to keep account of all of our petty little needs. 

Author of Letting Go, David R. Hawkins writes:

On the lower levels of consciousness, which are characterized by egotism, there is so much concern with self-gain that there is little energy or thought given to our effect on others. On the level of courage, we no longer identify solely with the small self. The world is no longer seen as the depriving or punishing bad parent. Instead, the world is seen as challenging and presenting opportunities for growth, development and new experiences. Thus, the level is characterized by optimism and the feeling that with the correct facts, education, and orientation, sooner or later most problems can be worked out satisfactorily.  

This essay is titled The Rituals of the Spirit as a play on the word Spiritual. If everything is energy, then the way we make the best of this energy is through spiritual practices. We keep our spirits intact and are made aware of all the ways that we squander our energy in the spiritual realms. We tap into our highest levels of consciousness when we engage in rituals of the spirit. Self-awareness becomes part of the protocol, and we are awakened to all the ways that we are living impoverished small lives, lives characterized by “feeling unworthy, being invalidated, judging others and ourselves, being inflated, always ‘winning’, being ‘right’, grieving the past, fearing the future, nursing our wounds, craving assurance, and seeking love instead of giving it (Hawkins).” Spiritual practices also help us keep first things first. While entertainment ever widens the interstices of our experiences, spirituality narrows it. FOMO becomes a genuine fear when we are under the compulsion of entertainment. Entertainment peddles a lie, that everything is accessible to us. It isn't and chasing the tail of entertainment is a boondoggle. The energy around us may be infinite but we are finite beings. We have a limited time on earth, and we can only channel a certain amount of energy in our lifetime. Even with money, there is a limit to the amount of it we will be able to work with. It is within these limits, where we get the opportunity to evaporate the nonessentials from our lives, and truly home in on the essentials. 

“As a man’s real power grows, and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower, until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.” Ursula LeGuin, author of A Wizard of Earthsea, reminds us that energy is optimized through the narrow gate of life. More power to you!