Stepping My Game Up

(An OMG-solar-eclipse-on-my-year-lord-in-the-last-degree-of-my-4th-house reflection.)

I’m trying to work through a narrowing-down transition in whom I feel I am addressing in my writing.

The phrase “for householders” has been in place for a while, but I feel I might have been importing some unconsciously internalized early-Buddhism-and-chareidi-Judaism-flavored biases about depth of practice.

That is, I positioned “householders” as rejecting the ascetic mountaintop “home-leaving” practice of the unattached first-world young people who surrounded me, because we don’t have time or energy for that sort of thing, and all we need is a practice that gets us through the day. And on top of that, maybe the rigors of family and career life give us some training in chaos and compassion, and that’s our counterpart to renunciate training.

But I am not sure this gives us enough credit.

When I take a look around me now — now that 40th birthdays are happening, children are getting to school bus age, and so on — I’m realizing householders are increasingly the most occult people I know. The people with the least legible, most eccentric, most fractally diverse practices, as opposed to the readily encapsulated Disciplines of single-minded seekers.

I’m starting to detect that a common line of social critique — that settling down, starting a family, furthering the line, &c. is a reactionary head-in-the-sand sort of move, and that real revolutionaries ought to roam freely, avoid entrapping commitments, follow their bliss — is actually itself the stance that reeks of Boomer hippie shit for a world that one imagines belongs to oneself.

But maybe village-building in a world on fire is actually the act of insane, visionary faith!

Just look at the techno-rationalists and their Hail Mary AI utopia!

How could anyone concerned with Understanding the Information of this world press forward with faith in mere natural intelligence? Just look at the data!

Whereas my young family looks the way it does because of a series of personally targeted Divine messages, and I’m far from the weirdest person I know in that regard. And I’m not talking about following some religious community script; I’m talking about ignoring consensus.

I’m talking about tuning in directly to what the Divine is saying to you, so as to bring about the minute-by-minute conditions outlined in the Vision, without letting any lesser being’s control mechanisms get in the way.

That is how the magic-wielding householders I know — myself included — live our lives!

So I am reframing how I speak and relate to householder dharma/torah, from a beginner’s frame to an advanced frame.

I’m stepping my game up.

That’s what householders do with every step.