#38 | We Shall Dance With Chaos - Ramon Parish (Naropa University)
“The deep imagination can give us pictures of what’s possible, and beyond that, what the collective is yearning towards.”
My guest today is Ramon Parish, an assistant professor in Naropa University’s department of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Ramon has been synthesizing mindfulness, embodiment, social justice, the environment, and ritual & ceremony for over a decade, and has helped usher hundreds of young people through contemporary threshold experiences.
In our conversation today, we explore a dazzling array of themes, including: the impact of comics as modern mythologies, the power of healing personal and ancestral trauma through movement, the spiral dynamics of emergence, and how these uncertain times ask that we become riders of chaos.
LINKS
JOIN THE MYTHIC MASCULINE NETWORK
SHOW NOTES
Opening meditation
Absence of the father
“God is your provider”
Comics as modern mythologies
Encountering the world through poetry
Synchronicity and order
Finding embodiment through dance
The body stores generational trauma
The wisdom of the mosh pit
Fields of initiatory intensity
Generation X and rage
Gen Z and despair
Undergrad as an initiatory journey
How to ride chaos
The dynamics of emergence
What the collective is yearning towards
Storming of the capitol
The technology of astrology
Attention to narrative
New wine in old wine skins
A seven generational project
Putting ourselves back together
TRANSCRIPTION
Ramon Parish: So just bringing your attention to your breath. Letting your belly relax. Be soft. You might rock a bit side to side or back and forth. See that you're nicely planted in your seat. Letting your shoulders relax. Maybe raising your sternum a bit. Noticing the places where your body is making contact with support. Be a chair. Be the side of the bed. Be the floor. Might even be outside.
Just noticing the weight of your body. Noticing the subtle tug of gravity. Now feeling into your uprightness. Noticing your spine. Maybe there's a nice little curve in the small of your back. Letting your shoulders drop. Softening your jaw. Even that space behind your eyes and sinuses. We often hold tension there. Feeling the crown of your head. Just noticing the rise and the fall of the breath.
There's no need to change anything. There's nothing to do. Just noticing that pull of gravity and that rise of breath. Letting yourself rest in it for a moment.
Noticing your breath in the backside of your body. Noticing the front side. Softening the throat. Noticing the left side shoulders. Down your arm. The right side. Coming back into that centre line.
I'm going to ask you, Ian, and any of our listeners wherever and whenever you might hear this, to join us in a bow. This is one of the ways that we open our classes and our meetings at Naropa University. It's not a bow to anyone, and it's not a bow to anything. It's an offering of our heart and attention.
So on the count of three, one, two, bowing. Thank you.
IM: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Ramon, for inviting us into such a spacious groundedness in order to have our conversation today. I love to begin my conversations by asking the guests to share a little of where they are now in this moment geographically and spiritually, that feels called to be shared.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I'm currently on the front range of Colorado, right? Sort of east of the Rocky Mountains, between Denver and Boulder, Colorado, approximately. And this is the traditional and historical land of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, the Ute, some people say the Apache, and like a lot of places in the United States, we have streets, we have Arapahoe Boulevard and so on. So, just want to put that out there.
We just got a huge snow, like two feet snow. So I'm kind of looking out the window at a white landscape. And as far as where I am I grew up in Colorado, grew up in Denver, grew up in Aurora, lived in the mountains for a little while.
And I'm at home. I don't teach classes today, so it's kind of a work day or meeting day or restoration day and I think that's kind of where I would start.
IM: Thank you. I'm very excited for our conversation today because I feel like so much of your journey and your work actually threads a lot of the themes that we touch on actually in this podcast. Certainly, we approach conversations on masculinity mythology and at the same time, there's rites of passage, there's poetry, there's culture, so many elements that seem as I did the research, that explored, worked in and beyond. Oh, embodiment of course is another. And so I'd love to get to most of it in our conversation today.
Perhaps to begin, to ask a little bit more about your upbringing and what was it in your youth, or who did you look to for your models of masculinity you were growing up?
Ramon Parish: I mean, that kind of gets right at the heart of it. My parents separated when I was really young; I was three. And so, growing up, I didn't meet my father. So just to put that out there, just like this standard place of the father as the kind of grown man/male figure in your life out of there.
And I had two brothers, three sisters. I had an older brother and a younger brother and my brothers and I, we got down. We hung out in our basement and we drew comic books and we made rocket ships and battering rams out of cardboard. And we played action figures and we had a good time as a young child.
My mother a religious, born again Christian woman. And one of the things she would tell us from early age is, well, she told us a lot of stories about my dad. Right. But she was like, God's your father, in the sense of who is playing the role of the provider in the family, like who's creating these opportunities for me. the way that we get over every month is a miracle, in other words.
And then I think in terms of tangible people, I was in middle school and I had a couple of teachers. I had a history teacher, Jim Blanness. He was a great guy and he was really a philosophy teacher in disguise and he gave us a lot of the rudiments of Western philosophical thinking, in disguise, in a way that middle schoolers could deal with it. And he was also open and he listened to us and he stayed after class and he talked with us and he had the trust of a certain number of students. I was a mischievous kid in a way , I was like the nicest of the mischevious kids.
So yeah, I had some teachers and I also had another teacher, J.C. Pritchard, and I went to a private school. It was a predominantly white school. But Pritchard was one of the only black teachers in the school. He sported dreadlocks, little short dreads, and I just kind of unconsciously modeled myself after him after a certain point.
As I got older, I started to grow some dreads and then I'm listening to Bob Marley and then, you know what I'm saying? You start going away from the actual people, men in your life, to the sort of popular culture figures who were embodying certain types of masculinity. I was influenced by the Rastafari movement in my youth and of course I was listening to classic rock, I was listening to hip hop. All the various figures that were projected through that imprinted themselves.
And, truth be told, I was a big comic book fan. I was 18 and I was reading these comic books. I was into these stories and I was into modern mythologies. And even that, like the ridiculous, unattainable masculinities that get projected through that. That all went in the subconscious too.
IM: I'm curious: which comics were the ones that stood out for you?
Ramon Parish: My favourite was the X-Men. I like the X-Men. I also cite my older brother as one of my role models growing up, he somehow or other was always taller than me the entire time. And he still is, and he was tall enough, even when we were 10 years old and he seemed bigger.
My older brother and I would stay up until four in the morning just discussing the politics of the X-Men. Professor X is Martin Luther King and Magneto was Malcolm X and the mutants were Black people. We're trying to help society and it hates us. We were really into that storyline and a lot of the characters there.
IM: Wow. It makes me think of, right off the bat, the power of story. I have another teacher, a fellow named Stephen Jenkinson, who said one time that there's no story in an argument and there's no argument in a story, so you can keep them apart. I think he was making a comment that when somebody makes an argument or says this and that are for and against, it's like you can be in opposition to it, but a story is a story. It's like it's a prism in a way.
And so I see in what you're saying, that the ability to look through story, in this case the universe of the X-Men, and to find insight into situation or how you saw the world or what was meaningful. I'm really struck by that.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I mean, a story is just like, can you just go along with it? And if you can go along with it, then it takes you somewhere.
As I got older, I got into philosophy. I got to a point where I couldn't read fiction. I just wanted the theory. Even if I was reading fiction, I would just go to the part where they really hit you with the lesson. That was all I wanted at a certain point. I just wanted the "truth." That changes, obviously, over time too.
IM: Yeah. Well, I read in a previous interview that I looked up, you said you had a poetry phase. I wonder if you could speak a little to that as well.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. It started senior year of high school. I did a project and my project was researching postmodern poetry and then I was supposed to write some. I didn't know what it meant at that time, and I'm not sure I know what it means now, but I started to look into into the Beats. I was looking into Amiri Baraka. I was looking into Jim Morrison. One of my buddies gave me the album An American Prayer. And that just took me out of high school into college, basically.
I was looking at a lot of slam poetry, like from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. And then I was riding around in cars with my buddies being crazy and trying to have encounters with the world. And I found that I was trying to document my experience, basically through poetry. I was also studying different art movements, looking into surrealism. I kind of got into some of the practices they had there as far as automatic writing.
I don't know how free this podcast is, how free I am to talk honestly about my experiences, but I was also doing what a lot of kids are doing in the nineties and the seventies and the fifties and the 2010s and now. I was partying a lot and I was exposing my system to a lot of different chemicals and I was having experiences that I had no words for. The only way I could make sense of them, without them driving me crazy, was to try to write and describe and bring combinations of words together that spoke to them. And so sometimes it was like I was recording inner narrations or inner pictures, series, and other times it was just automatic writing.
And then I would just see what came out and of course most of it was garbage, but over time I started to notice the rhythmic quality and the types of images that my inner voice would use. Then it got to a point where it wasn't even about the party and it was like I started to make a practice out of writing and I would go home after class or I would go home after I had been out and I would just sit down and I got disciplined about it.
Then it started to open up things. It started to open up my dream life. It started to open up the imaginal realm and then weird stuff started to happen where I started to find synchronicities between the things that would come up with the poetry and things that were in my actual experiences. The poetry would somewhat predict the experience, it wasn't just like I was documenting what had happened through poetry. It was like I would write about certain themes and it's really abstract and kind of hard to explain, but then I would just like have these encounters with people. I would be like: What is going on here?
IM: How you explain that phenomenon? I mean synchronicity. Some people have heard it and I believe it was actually Carl Jung who coined the term, but in some sense, people might say serendipity or there's other words that are kind of there.
I heard this other quote attributed to say maybe a pan-Indigenous understanding, but it was like, if you're not living your life in synchronistic fashion, like if synchronicities aren't happening, they'll be like, "Ooh, what's wrong?" It's sort of the opposite to maybe the modern world where it's kind of like, if it starts happening, it's weird. Whereas a different understanding, a connected place, it's actually pretty "normal" in a sense. Anyway, I'm curious if that's how it started to feel to you, of a kind of baseline relationality with existence.
Ramon Parish: Yeah, I would say at this point in my life, it is, and that I would say the synchronicities are more spaced out. Like between each happenstance and that they're softer. But I think that in my earlier days when I was really kind of in the writing, during the poetry phase, it was like a turbulence. It was like a on-ramp and they really had to come at me hard in order to get my attention.
I also had a lot of questions at that time, too. It was like I was running a couple of tracks of inquiry. I was running the philosophical track where I was reading existentialist philosophers, I'm reading ancient philosophers. What is the truth? And then there was another track of working with the imagination and working with, honestly, biochemistry and trying to induce visionary states. And then the last track was just observing my experience in being in the natural world more.
And I also developed the practice of just watching the moon and just checking in with the moon on a regular basis. And I guess I feel like what I started to find was I felt like I would be in situations again and again, and it would be different people. It would be a different place, but the underlying structure of the situation was the same. And if I acted in a certain way in the situation, I would have to do it again. And if I made a different choice, I could advance forward. And so it was sort of like déjà vu, synchronicity, and cycles. And I think that's kind of what woke up at that time is that there was this perception that life was somewhat cyclical or spiralic and not just in the overt sense of like the sun comes up and goes down, but also in like some of the themes that come at us in our lives.
IM: Love this. I'm curious where the themes of rites of passage or embodiment came in. Which came first? Because I understand these also have become pillars in your life experience.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I kind of took up guys like, say Jim Morrison's adventure, like "take up this adventure of consciousness." I just sort of did it as an 18-year-old, naively, and then I actually had experiences, internal experiences and private experiences, but also moving it through the world experiences of discovery.
I think part of this is just youth. It just happens. And I feel like I had these breakthroughs, but I didn't have that many people that I could share them with. As I graduated from college, part of that whole set of experiences was I met my wife, the person that would become my life partner, through crazy synchronicities, through the "hall of mirror" of choices and wrong choices and right choices.
And we started a family, we just kind of went with it. We had a friend from college who was a dual dance and religion major. We went to Colorado College in the Springs, and he had started to go from Colorado Springs to Boulder and he started to dance with this woman, Melissa Michaels. She is an embodiment teacher and I would say a kind of spiritual educator who works through the body and expressive arts. My wife, Michelle, got wrapped up with working with Melissa.
At that time we had a one-year-old daughter. I'm outside of the place where they're dancing and I'm just listening to people go for it. I'm listening to the drums go off. I'm listening to people scream, people come out there in tears. was just like, I don't understand this. I had no context for it. The only dancing I'd done is in the dark, in smoky rooms and even that was very small and contained and hidden.
We stayed in contact with Melissa for a few years and at this point I had started backing my way into being an educator. I had a toddler who just completely reorganized my nervous system. thought I was cool. I was a college student. I thought I was enlightened. I thought I was chill. Then it was like, Oh my God! I don't know how to handle this girl. I don't know how to handle the emotional volume that she brought into my life.
Then I was working with boys, most of them were English as Second Language from Spanish-speaking families. They called themselves retards there was a lot of anger in these rooms I was working with these kids with.
I had spent a lot of time on my head. A lot of time in my imagination. The family life and the work life was bringing me down. It was bringing me down. Then it was bringing me into my heart in a way that I wasn't prepared for. One year Melissa said, Hey we're doing a training for working adults, spaced out over a year. Because the one that Michelle had done was in summertime. And she said, Are you interested? Typically, she had been a voice to Michelle, and I was like, sure. Something had changed.
So I went in and there's this beautiful building in the hills of Boulder called the Star House and it's kind of like a mixture of an astrological temple and a log cabin, if that helps your visual. So I'm up here in this room and I'm just going to be totally frank. I'm mostly in a room with women and mostly in a room with white people. I was just like, this is weird. But she started to give us these instructions about paying attention to different parts of our body and working with it through movement. And within 20 minutes, I was like, wow! This is amazing.
It was working with Melissa Michaels and her SomaSource program or the Surfing the Creative is the name of the summer rites of passage program. That's really what I would say initiated me into this larger conversation about rites of passage. I'd had my own sort of private and personal unfoldings, but in terms of bringing those into the community and learning the sort of language of rites of passage and of life developmental sequences and phases and rites of passage as something that continues throughout a lifetime. As far as this whole language around working intergenerationally, that my it kind of initiation into that.
IM: Wow, quite a story. I should mention as well I have a two-and-a-half-year-old as well. So your description of just the enormity and I think you said the reorientation of your nervous system is very accurate. So I appreciate hearing it spoken in that way.
And this call to embodiment, I hear in what you're saying as well, that the of overemphasis on the mind or the rational intellectual imaginal realm even. Yeah. And how that can really mean one hovers above. I'm actually thinking of the image, I think Robert Bly talks about in Iron John, of the Peter Pan or the fly boy, the puer I think is of this up in the clouds and this noble intent of finding the truth and all that from that, And yet, I think what's coming to light now, in a lot of ways, is especially this need to emphasize the body or to embody the wisdom or to embody the, don't know if it would be called truth, but I hear that in what you're saying.
I would love for you to also speak a little about what did you begin to notice within these two worlds, especially for men as well. You spoke about being in a room with mostly women, mostly white women, here you are. What did you begin to notice by in these, spaces that men could take
Ramon Parish: Yeah. The way that Surfing the Creative was set up is, it was sort of a journey from birth to youth. It was like a recounting of that journey. And at some point you touch adolescence and every time I would get to that adolescent period, it was just so painful that I tried to steer around it.
And I think part of what happened is I went to these private schools, pretty much white private schools, and that was a big piece of my disembodiment. I became alienated from myself. I became numb to myself. I became intellectual because it was too hard to feel the loneliness. And honestly, just the flat-out racist ignorance of my classmates. So I abstracted myself and I was prone to do that anyway. I mean, I've been a dreamer since day one. Colorado skies, man, big skies out here.
Then I think here's another one that I only start to notice when I have my own kids. I was very physical with my kids, more so than the kids' mother. I don't necessarily see that as a definite thing that a dad is going to be more physical with the kids. But I think that there are cultural tracks for that already. My dad played pro football and that's a whole other story, but that had something to do with how we got split off.
I realized that I didn't have anyone in my life at a young age that was physical with me. Even amongst my brothers, I was already the kid who had his head in the books. Or was drawing. I wasn't out there with a football. I think from early age and then heightened in high school or middle school, I just became abstracted from myself.
As I got into these rooms and we had our attention directed through movement into all of the different parts of the body, the idea and a lot of somatic psychology is that the body stores memory and it stores trauma.
Now we're finding that not only does the body store its own trauma, but it actually stores, and people have known this for a long time, it actually stores generational trauma. So we got to a certain point and we utilized Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms structure. When we would get to the chaos part of it, I would go into rages.
And this is my subjective perspective, not necessarily the truth, but I did not believe that that room was prepared to deal with the kind of rage that I think a lot of Black folks experience, housed in our bodies, and then men in particular. So they had to shore up certain practices just in order to deal with me.
Soon after, I was in these spaces, we started to actually make connections with other communities around the country and around the world. Our rooms actually got more diverse. We had, Black folks from Baltimore and Black folks from South Africa and Israelis and Palestinians, and people from Oroville, all in one room.
On the one hand, the body is universal, it's like what we all share. We all have similar structure, but we are all also carrying different cultural traumas, lineages, and genius through the body, and we have different ways of moving. I started to notice, on the one hand, the universality: fear, excitement, sadness, anger, joy, serenity. On the other hand, I started to really see the specific stuff that I was carrying, both in my own life and also just like ancestral thunder storms. And learning how to titrate.
Because when you actually try to bring all that through, I had times I'm almost ripped my arms out of my sockets. would get into my own and then I could go all the way back. I think one of the biggest things I learned there was just how to start the process of working with and acknowledging anger. I wasn't comfortable with anger. I wasn't comfortable, obviously, with grief, but I was a little bit more acquainted with grief than I was with anger.
IM: So much in there. Thank you. What I'm thinking of is how important this layer is, particularly around this of toxic masculinity, because to be honest, I found it challenging and others have pointed this out too, that in some ways toxic masculinity could be seen as symptomatic of essentially, I hear this unprocessed anger, unprocessed grief.
All this stuff that, it's approached from that level of understanding, this is what I feel in my uncovery process is that it feels like it's still dealing with the symptoms and I've been in spaces, particularly men's spaces, I'm thinking of another group Sacred Sons, based in California. I was at one of their convergences and I was really struck in what they call carpet work. A little bit like Mankind Project-style process, but a lot more focused on bioenergetics, a lot more focus on just the following of energy, giving it expression, in a container with lots of other men, where there was pretty much with every guy such a level of either anger or sadness, grief, that would come forth at a level.
I've been in that kind of space before, so it wasn't a surprise, but for me it was really profound to see the level of containers that was needed to really move that energy, to move that stuckness. Then the profound serenity that seemed to emerge on the other side of was so clear to me. I was like, Oh! Talking about this stuff really only gets you so far and how this deep need to come back to this body's intelligence, in the right containers, in the right invitations is so vital.
I hear you speaking about the experience, particularly for you as a Black man and for men general as well. you Feel like it's still not quite as prominent, I think, as it needs to be. to really to shift what needs in order to create a new culture.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I mean, you think about like the mosh pit, kids get together and they kind of beat each other up in a controlled way, and it has a certain ethics to it. At a certain point, we did that kind of stuff where it was everybody between this age, all the men between 21 and 28 in the centre. Then we were just [explosion sound]. All the men between 28 and 36. All the men between 36 and 45. And just move it! And we learned to go 75%. Go 50%. Go 25%. To space it and even a partial expression of it was enough to unwind the energy in a lot of cases.
So yeah, you definitely can't just talk about it. And I mean, our bodies get full of these feelings. They get full of them. This was so necessary for me before I could even get into say sitting meditation. I could not sit in my twenties. I had to go through so many cycles of this kind of full emotional process and this full embodiment and expression and moving out of emotion. After you do it a bunch, it's like a storm. After the storm goes, the ground's clean, the skies refreshed and scintillating. And occasionally you get a rainbow.
So I think there's just so many men that, on the one hand, being angry is a safe emotion. You can walk around the world and be pissed. the other hand, you can't really be pissed. You can't really show it. You can't really go all the way through with it and you can't understand it a lot of times as a form of tenderness. I think because men have done so much violence and we do so much violence and we organize and we strategize to slingshot anger at one another and slingshot anger at women and slingshot anger at gender non-conforming people. We've done it for centuries. People are like, "No more of that!"
We need places where we can do that. We need places where people understand that it's actually like in a mosh pit. You walk out. Not that I ever did it. I'm justsecondhanding here. Never did that. Was never part of those scenes. But you walk out and people are happy and they're like, "You got a bloody nose." So I don't want to say we need to do that, but I think that's what happens. This is a lot what we talk about in these rites of passage courses is that when young people don't have elders to help them hold these fields of initiatory intensity, they start making up their own, with more or less success.
IM: Yeah, thanks for that link there. I have this image or I've come to understand this image of the elder as a grounding function or old growth trees in a diverse ecosystem that what becomes possible, what kind of energy can be alchemized within becomes so much more possible.
And when I've been in group process where I've say been facilitating transformation or whatever it is, and I've got some elders there, I'm like, okay, we got this, there's a sense, whatever comes up. the group field can hold because this that is held by the elders. And without them, yeah, it feels way more precarious to open up these spaces, to open up the deep wounds or these ancestral storms, like you say, and not be able to contain them actually in the space because we don't have them.
So it's a really tricky moment too, because I do feel that there's not as many as I would love to have let's say to, serve the elder function, in the culture at this time, they themselves haven't lived in such a way to even know what to do at the time and in those moments.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is still counter-cultural. It still hasn't hit the mainstream. I think also this is another thing that I'm interested in, the study of generational cohorts. The boomers. I've got a son. He's 16 and he calls me a boomer. It pisses me off. "Please! Stop it! I'm Generation X, man." Even in the countercultures and you think of Bly and those guys, that first generation of men's movement , they had to find spaces to work with anger because the larger counterculture wasn't really working with anger.
I mean, people were expressing it, but they weren't turning towards it consciously and then spinning it all the way out you up and they weren't honouring it. They were just pissed off at the government or whatever. I think the ethos of a lot of the musicians and artists and revolutionaries of the boomer generation wasn't a conscious working with anger. Whereas I feel like Generation X was consciously working with anger.
If we look at it like two of the biggest musical movements of Generation X, it's hip hop and it's punk music, and maybe heavy metal. Let's throw heavy metal up in there too. These were places where the central emotion that we're dealing with is rage. So I actually think Generation X knows a lot about that. I think a lot of the people, male, female, and then let's even get Riot grrrl in there. A lot of our generation knows about that. And I feel like if we can make that knowledge, that being steeped in rage, conscious and practiced.
Beause, I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm getting to the second half of life and I really see, and especially working with young people, college-aged students, I see, "Oh! I'm not a youth anymore." Psychologically, I'm not in that place anymore. I'm an adult. Because we can't skip over adulthood for elderhood. There's different functions, the turn is more towards offering and holding space.
Then this is another one is, I got teenage kids, they're all teenagers now. And I think this generation is dealing with anxiety and grief to a degree that I think Gen X and the millennials, the millennials, for sure, but man, the Gen Z kids, the kids coming up, because they know, and they're seeing, they're seeing climate change unfold in real time.
We had the fires this summer in Colorado, it was rain and ashes here, snowing ashes. I've lived here for 40 years. I've never seen that. COVID smacked them. If you look at those, say, let's say the rap and trap music they're making, it's a sadder kind of rap than what we listened to.
IM: Yeah. I'm really appreciating you making that link as well, because I actually hadn't paid attention to much of the pop music, I guess, more popular with the younger generations. Particularly, I think the Grammy's maybe a year or two ago and Billie Eilish. She was quite big at the time and I'd just never really tuned in. Then when I went and tuned into her music, I was like, "Whoa!" It carries that vibe you're talking about right now. It's almost like so gone to not care, while still pointing at what caring might even look like in some sense. But it's so, what I'm saying? It's so self-aware of, a kind of the point? You And it's, yeah. It's really difficult for older generations to understand that level of coming of age within that kind of clarity.
I was born in '81, so I think I just squeaked into a little millennial, first millennial, but the idea of climate change and all that was still a vague memory. It was the ozone was getting depleted a little bit or something. We had to do something about it, but it was not the same as now. Where like you're saying it's real time, it's happening right now. And the kind of psychological/spiritual consequence of that is beyond significant.
I guess that's my question too. What is our role in offering something? What do you say your 16-year-old Who's kind of like, what's the point? Like why go to school? Climate change is basically saying game over in 15 years or something like that, right? How do you deal with that kind of math that is hard to refute in some ways.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I Think we're in a real rethink and real struggle in education right now and in higher education. Right. That's where I'm located. Because there is this sense of "I'm going to graduate, first of all with enormous debt and the world that we're being trained for is really, really falling apart. I mean, we've been in this historical moment since the baby boomer generation, but it has now reached the level of criticality to where we're watching climate change unfold in real time.
Of course, climate change has human consequences, as well as ecological consequences. And actually human beings are the drivers. So if we're exhausting the planet, we gotta be exhausted. And you can see it in the classrooms. Kids are exhausted. But I think one of the things that the university can do, and also I think the school does, period, is it creates social context. If we don't have to be together, the way that the world is going, we won't be together. You know what I'm saying?
Now we got this whole Zoom space opened up and it's great on a certain level. It allows you and I to have this conversation, blah, blah, blah. But in a few year, your delivery trucks will be remote controlled. You can order your food. You can stream your music. You can order your books, your clothes, you won't even hardly have to deal with people. And I think one of the things that compulsory schooling has done is made it so that we still have to deal with each other.
And I think we have to take advantage of the community aspect of school. And the fact that we are going through an experience that's shared. And I think that's a way that we can start to look at education, particularly at the undergraduate level, I believe, as an initiatory experience. Because that's what it was for me. Between 18 and 23, I had this big breakthrough, internally. And then in my later twenties, I was met by people like Melissa that helped me to make a social context and develop practices to bring it out into the world.
So I think part of our role as educators is to help the young people go down into the depths or go up into the sky and then come back with something and have it be in a group of people who are going through something similar. And then as far as that relates to the world and changing things in the world, it's like we gotta be pulling from the deep imagination and we have to teach people how to manage chaos, how to ride chaos and how to be like, "It's going to keep changing. It's going to keep changing." Some part of you has to stay fluid and creative and even exploit the changes.
IM: Love where we're going with this. A couple of key themes that have come are one, I love the idea that education is more explicitly geared towards offering a social context or a meaning-making context through an initiatory time. Because I do think my understanding of education, at leastwhen I was going in, I know some things have changed depending on where we're talking about, was largely about preparing workers for the workforce.
Right. And that to me feels less and less how do you prepare kid for the workforce that is, as you say, it's going to be changing or the jobs that were there are gone by the time they get there. So I guess what I'm saying is the emphasis on a kind of book learning education. If you know how to sort of say it that way, versus a kind of like you say, a kind of self-developing, meaning-making. In a previous interview, I heard you mentioned Bill Plotkin's work.
Who I've also interviewed on this podcast. And so, some sense of really bringing forth their mythopoetic identity, their sense of service to this time. That would actually be a useful, thing to undergo within a shared context that school perhaps could transform into something like that, which does in a way, mostly I think unconsciously, Because that's just how the youth will experiment, but it's not as a conscious or intentional.
And I really, liked how you brought forth that thread, because like you say, training for the capacity to ride chaos is actually a skill that is actually needed. Not preparing for again to be some worker bee. We don't need that. Especially with an economic system that has so clearly tipped its bankruptcy, visible now.
And you also mentioned earlier sacred economics the film I had done with Charles Eisenstein, which tried to reveal the possibility that an economic system could be different. It could value different things. It could invite different kinds of behaviour rather than greed and hoarding, it could actually invite other qualities of human nature, which are just as possible when you're in a system that actually values those things. So yeah, I see that they're codependent arising and sort of this image I'm getting and I just really love that we've arrived here.
Which brings me now to one major thread of my own research into this principle or phenomenon of emergence. And I've heard you mention as well that you love to teach in an emergent environment. It was mentioned in another interview and I would just love to get your take on things, because I have my take on what I think emergence isespecially in the context of now and how do we sort of respond to these times? I'd love to just start there. For you, what do you understand emergence to be? You know, what serves it? How does it happen?
Ramon Parish: Yeah, so I feel like in classrooms, typically, at least once a week, there's a moment that is surprising. I would say a couple of times every semester there are transformational moments for one or a group of students or something. There's moments where we have these little breakthroughs. I think it was Malidoma Somé. I think he was one of the people who I heard articulate this, that our ritual, at a certain point, has to have some chaos to it. You go in, you set it up and you sort of know when it's going to begin and maybe how the idea of when it's going to end, but there's going to be a point in it at which the unknown enters into the space.
And that, in fact, it's not a ritual until the unknown enters into the space. And when we begin our classes at Neropa this bow thing, and when we're talking about the mechanics of ritual, you got to have an opening gate and a closing gate. And so this bow thing is how we open the gate and it's how we close the gate.
And so I think it starts to set our consciousness as a group to enter into some kind of fluctuating ritual type of space. So I think you kind of know you have to have a way in, but then once you start to get in, then I really think it becomes a part about listening and just watching for what emerges and where the energy is going and where it's calling, and where it's stuck. And then I think as we listen, and then we bring our attention and we have a willingness to go off track a little bit and to go off script. Then I feel like we start to work with the dynamics of emergence.
Now I'm a bit of a soft believer that the imagination can prefigure reality. I think that's another reason why you want to tap the deep imagination because the deep imagination can give us pictures of what's possible and not even what's possible, but I would say what's yearning. What the collective is yearning towards. So if you have a sense of what that yearning is, if your imagination is fertilized by these pictures, then when you're in the spaces of emergence, sometimes you see something you're like, there it is. There. That.
So on the one hand, I think we have to be paying attention. We have to be listening. We have to be receptive towards, you know, when we're with a group of people or whatever the situation is, can even be the weather, with what is presenting itself.
And on the other hand, I think we have to, in the backs of our minds and consciousness, we have an expanded field of possibility so that when the new shows itself, we know what we're seeing and we reach for it.
IM: You just made me think of again in Sacred Economics, Charles has coined: "The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible," I think is one example of this sense that this collective yearning that is maybe below the surface and maybe a lot don't know how to articulate it, but when they sense it, when it's present in the room, that possibility, there's a moving towards it. And I think that's vital, like you say, that those images are there because I do think, en masse, I'd see a lot of challenge with trying to find what do we want?
That whole thing. It's like, well, we know what we don't want, I think. We don't want to go that way. We don't want to cause more destruction, talking about masculinity. We don't want to create more domination and trespass and we don't want that but what do we want? What is that longing pointing towards, a possibility? What could masculinity be for me this is so much of what this podcast actually does tries to be That sense of some kind of whisper of that possibility which in some ways brings forth a lot of older understandings.
We had Pat McCabe, who is an Indigenous grandmother, who's in an incredible episode, it sounds like you know her, where she just talks about that and offered a prayer for men in her way. And it was just like, men are weeping, by the end of it. When's the last time they got blessed by an Indigenous grandmother?
So it kind of awakened something like you say, and I really liked that interface between this working with emergence, in that case, and in ritual. In some ways I see them as interchangeable, like you've demonstrated. The ability to intentionally prepare in a way for that moment of possibility.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. I mean, god, look at 2020. 2020 was a year of emergence. We just have basically been witnesses to these collective dramas playing out. The summer: George Floyd's murder, Breonna Taylor's murder, worldwide response to it. Fire on the streets. I went to the Capitol downtown Denver. People had spray painted all over the capitol, shattered windows. It hurt, hurt, hurt to see that. I mean, and I'm not even a guy believes hard in the system, but just to see that people were like, the symbols of authority...
And think about it: these capitols, these statutes, these are all ritual objects. These are all focal points of our attention, at the least, if not actual magical devices. People were like, we're destroying those. We are removing those. We are done with that way of doing magic, with that way of organizing consciousness. We no longer respect that authority. And even in their own way, the Trumpers won that too. When they hit the Capitol, they put their feet up on the desk because "We don't respect this."
And I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm a jump all over the place for a second. Another thing that I've gotten, another technology that I've been learning over the years is astrology. And it started with looking at the moon. It started with Colorado's big skies and you can look at individual patterns and you could look at collective patterns through it. When you look at the collective patterns for this decade, there are big convergences that are happening in this decade.
If you look at 2020, you can read. Of course, we can't predict what's going to happen because that's the thing I think with emergence, you can have a sense that, "Oh, here, comes the moment!" These two factors are coming together and oop, now you can't tell what they're going to do. You can't map the spiral of transformation. You just have to go through it or witness it, but you can get a sense of if this factor and this factor come together [explosion sound].
And so just from that astrological perspective, as a way to look at our times, this decade is going to be momentous. Things that are going to happen very quickly. Icebergs are going to fall off the continent. And I think that coming into this decade with this awareness of almost that ritual emergence awareness. I think the question is really how do we contain it? How do we create containers the language of ritual?
Then I guess, finally, just with the whole masculinity bit of it, because this is a big piece. Let's look at the Trumpers again. A lot of this stuff is about masculinity. It's about a perception of masculinity that is now so taxed and so challenged that it's like doing what it always did, which is it's going to go down in a hail bullets. And it's like somehow or another, I think that we got to create a space for us to actually be angry together and with one another. And I mean this like even cross-racially, I don't know how it's done. But I think this is part of the whole conversation around reparations. Like all this stuff. It's like somehow or another, we got to create a space where we can go into the historical trajectory that led us to this point and do it through ritual. Hold each other through it, through ritual.
IM: I got chills.
Ramon Parish: I'm going all over place, but...
IM: No, this is profound. I really, really appreciate this exploration and what struck me about what you said with this approaching the decade from essentially like a ritual alertness? Is, what are the specific tools in a way that one can equip themselves with, to be at the ready? Because those are very different tools than if one stepping into a world, let's say which is somewhat concrete. If you can be like, "Oh, yeah. It'll be like this." And so this is how I prepare for this world, but that's not the world. It's never really been the world, but it's certainly not the world we're stepping into this decade.
And so from our conversation, I'm finding these threads, these elements of mindfulness, for example. as I would call that probably like a key skill that is necessary for an alertness capability for this decade. Embodiment, that feels like another key piece. are we disconnected or are we actually tapped in, can we listen to our own body, where it wants to go, what does it need? I see others of ritual. The capacity to understand ritual, to what is a container. Opening/closing containers.
Alertness to the moment. What does the moment need as big forces are coming together and colliding, without a sense of where it might go, but the ability to say, okay, being prepared for that in a way. Not like, what do they call them? The sort of apocalypse preparers, like beans in the bunkers? Preppers. That's not what I'm saying, right, obviously. I'm saying that there's a kind of active capacity, active skillfulness that we can actually discern, I mean, through this conversation even, what readiness actually looks like and it's not waiting for something to happen. It's actually a kind of active skill skilling up. Yeah, hearing it that way. I'm curious if anything else comes to you?
Ramon Parish: Yeah, I actually really appreciated it. A lot of this is really clarifying. Because I feel like I'm just reaching a point in my life where I'm like, I'm really like us really starting to become about giving back. I really feel like the first half of your life is winding up and the second half is winding down and winding down is spiraling out.
And so, in a way I'm trying to collect all the lessons I've been learning and it's conversations helping me too in that.
So I think another one is some kind of experience and attention to narrative. One of the big struggles I feel like we're having the United States right now and around the world is about narrative. Attention to narrative and also the way in which imagination and narrative relate to each other. How do we fertilize the narratives that we work with, say, as "Americans" with fresh imaginations and imaginations that build on existing imaginations and then liberate them into new possibilities?
Another one I think, and I think a lot of the millennials have got this stuff down in a good way. in the Occupy scene is working with different systems of communication and decision making. Because once you're your own archetypal character, but you're got to relate to a whole bunch of other archetypal characters. So what are these different processes for making decisions and for circulating communication and power?
Another one, which I think a university could really take up and I don't quite see this yet, is the experimentation with systems. I mean, the university could really become a place where we are playing with and modeling systems. When you come out to the world and you have these basic, let's call them neurological skillsets of mindfulness and self-regulation and working with chaos and intensity. And then you have these social skillfulnesses of various communication and decision-making modalities, and then you have some experimentation or some skillfulness with constructing, altering, transforming systems.
Because that's the other piece of all of this. The situation that I feel that we're in, in so much of the world right now, is Jesus's parable about the new wine and the old wine skins. We have a lot of churning of new possibility. We have these new masculinities, new femininities. We've got people who are about to blaze gender out altogether. Still, we're stuck in these old containers. We're stuck circulating money in the same ways. We're stuck circulating electricity in the same ways. We're stuck with a built environment that was built in the height of white supremacist America that replicates the outcomes of that. We will know got the new has reached the earth when the infrastructure, the circulation of currency is actually congruent with how we feel and that's going to take a long time. But in the meantime, I just feel like as systems break down, we need to learn tools to, I don't know, experiment with systems. That's super emergent for me. I don't know how to do that one yet. I'm just projecting with the tongue.
IM: I really appreciate that. The task I feel for this generation or the generations marshaled now... As I've reflected on the sixties and seventies and really this flowering of consciousness and awakening, in many ways was an initial spiral towards another way. Communes, all this stuff. It was edgy then certainly, and yet in some ways...
There's this line in, I think it was in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, if you read that book. I remember just images from it, but this one just [explosion sound] always hits me. Hunter S. Thompson, he's capturing the moment when sort of in the heyday, I think it might've been mid-sixties at that point, and he says we really felt like we were the vanguard, we were changing things. We really felt like this was it. This was the moment. And he said he drove out to the desert one morning or afternoon, whatever it was. The way he describes it in writing is just so exquisite. And he says, as he looked out across the sand something like he could see or recognize where the wave crested without breaching the top and rolled back into the sea.
And it's [explosion sound]. It just so perfectly captures that possibility that was such a surge of "We're doing it!" And then boom! Rolling back and really the heartbreak I feel from a lot of the boomers, right, that a lot of them won't necessarily admit to now or don't know actually how badly heartbroken they were from not being the generation that did it and sort of conformed again and here we are, another ring on the spiral. And I would say, a lot of what was initially instigated then has come back around again and the moment has returned again as this momentum has built to real possibility of something not certain, of course, but real possibility I think has emerged again.
If there's a capacity to see, it's not like, Oh, they failed. So, forget them. It's over to us now. It's actually like, okay. Yeah, thanks for doing what you did. And then now we need you, because I also see, you said about the capacity to ride chaos is like we need people that have seen things in certain ways before and were sort of there before, were like, Oh, I remember this. I actually, I hear that a lot boomers when I invite them to different spaces of group process and shadow work. They're like, Oh, I remember this! And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we're here again and we need you. It's like that sense of we need you.
If their work was this initial flowering of consciousness and breaking everything down, I think this generation is to crystallize that consciousness in structures is what you've said that we need to actually have the stories of our institutions and our systems embody that story that more beautiful world I don't know how to do it either to be honest I feel like my work has been this trying to plant these seeds possibility amplifying the signal of those emergent creatives that are doing it. The activist movements occupy all these. Amplifying the signal. So in these liquid states when there's a lot more uncertainty of what are we going to do? That they're much more at the ready. And so I really loved the journey of our conversation today.
Ramon Parish: Yeah. Thank you. I didn't know I was going to talk about that!
IM: Well, perhaps emergence is among us right now. Is there anything you'd love to touch on before we close our conversation today, Ramon?
Ramon Parish: I guess one thought I was having, as you were speaking, is that maybe we should look at this as at least a seven generation project. If we start our account with the boomers, now you're Gen Z. That's four. We still got three left to go. So it's a long game that we're playing. I think we tell the youth a lot of times that it's up to them to create the change. And it's just not fair. It's up to everybody who's alive from their seat and time to do what they can and to work with the new generations, the older generations, from whatever their seat and time is and whatever their place.
I think we can't say what the earth is gonna do. I think it's just going to get tougher and tougher, ecologically. I think we all know that. And now it's here. But I really feel like the main revolution, the big thing that we're all trying to do is it's really just about healing. It's about putting ourselves back together. all these violent hero/masculine images out there. If you're a father in the best case scenario, your job is to really just protect the kids and see to it that the kids grow up well and that they have what they need. And I feel like that's what men and really all of us can do is just protect one another. And not in the sense of I'm going to fight off the danger, but just in a sense of just to help each other deal with the danger that comes up between us and the danger that we feel of just being who we are and feeling explosive and crazy and like no one's listening. How we kind of protect one another and respect one another and really foster a revolution of healing, or yeah, I don't know.
So that's what I see. I see a lot of students come in and they're hurt and it's like, okay, I have the job of imparting certain amount of information and skills, but really just about helping them put themselves back together again.
IM: Well, thank you so much for our time today, Ramon. Really, really appreciate our conversation.
