A little singing and swearing, to help us arrive at our awesome presence.

Humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om share a common root, and considering their interwovenness can help us to touch our basic dignity. In this contemplation, the first to have both swearing and singing, we look at some elements of the dominant culture’s way of living that indicate how Nature has gotten pushed into the shadow. We consider the architectural manifestos of Hundertwasser, the memories of Jung, and the teachings of world philosophers who seek to help us find our awesome presence, even in the most mundane or seemingly profane activities of life.

Human humus humility homo sapiens and Om: LoveWisdom and Scatology

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Today we go into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to re-release our series on magic. If you haven’t heard this series, I think you’re in for a treat. It’s like a box of wisdom donuts—paleo superfood wisdom donuts for the soul.

If you have listened to some or all of this series before, these podcasts usually require more than one listen. We go into ideas that we try to consider in a very accessible way, but those ideas have a lot of nuance and depth in them. Extensive contemplation will bring a lot of benefits, including some inspiration and insight into the nature of magic.

What lurks in the shadow of the spiritual psyche? We have asked about that a little already, but we’re going to look at something specific. We also want to ask about what lurks in the shadow of the artistic psyche, and especially the architectural psyche. How does architecture express our ignorance and our shadow? How do the arts express our ignorance and our shadow?

This is not just a question for artists. The idea is that art and architecture can both express and perpetuate our insanity. I work with artists a lot, because if we want to evolve our culture, we have to evolve the art, and to do that we have to evolve how art gets taught. Our artists, architects, engineers, and others who inevitably draw on creativity don’t get a good education in LoveWisdom, so they don’t have all the training they need to help our culture become genuinely healthy and thriving. When we look for the shadow in things like art and architecture, we look for ways that we can do a better job at healing.

As we have said many times in this series on the shadow, looking at some of these things can challenge us.

To put it in a way that might sound crass or vulgar, but which we might need to shock us awake: Can we look at our own shit?

Today’s contemplation marks our first to use explicit language. The subject matter is still the shadow, but we’re looking at the shadow in a different way, including a scatological perspective.

Our main expletive today is shit, and it won’t get worse than that, though for some people that might feel like a pretty crass word. I don’t think I ever heard my mother use the word “shit”.

My grandfather used the word “shit” a bit like a Texan.

He never lived in Texas, but his use of scatology seemed Texan to me. My cousin and I never laughed so hard as the time we were kids and we were watching an American football game on television with our grandfather, and as he observed a decidedly clumsy play by the home team he said in the most stoic manner, “Pshiiit.” It was so perfect in its expression that for years we would say it to each other just as he did.

Years later, I started writing a novel in which the main character is himself a writer, and he pens a rather clever first line for a story. It goes like this: A scatologist and an eschatologist walk into a bar.

I love that line because it sounds like the opening of a joke, and the story is a kind of cosmic joke story. In the story, the scatologist is an anthropologist who specializes in excrement and the ways culture’s deal with it, and the eschatologist is an anthropologist who specializes in the vision various cultures have had of ultimate things and possible endings for the world. Together they engage in an archeology of the soul, a kind of psychic archeology.

The opening line brings together the highest and lowest, and profane ends of things and the sacred ends of things, the scatology and eschatology.

In a slightly different way of bringing seemingly disparate things together, it seems important to recognize and reflect on the relationship between human, humus, humility, homo sapiens, and (somewhat more poetically perhaps) Om, the sacred syllable that holds such an important place in many philosophical and spiritual traditions of the “East”.

These words all share a common root (more mysteriously in the case of Om, since one can find much disagreement on its meaning and etymology . . . but we can certainly hear “Om” in “humus” if we have an ear for poetic resonance—and a heart for spiritual or philosophical resonance).

It seems important to remember and revere the deep connection between humus, humility, human, and Om.

We could say that LoveWisdom (our philosophy of life) needs rootedness in humus, rootedness in the soil,

and that philosophical/spiritual/psychological evolution, development, or maturation involves a certain degree of humiliation that gives rise to a gentle humility—in place of the hyper self-criticism and even self-loathing cultivated by many people caught up in the “western” mindset.

Humus is also a potential test for our shadow, because, depending on our psyche, the word humus could bring to mind the flush toilet.

That may seem surprising, but the flush toilet stands out as a wonderful example of how our life gets cut off from the natural world, how we can pretend to separate ourselves, and how Nature becomes part of our own shadow.

To put it bluntly: We don’t give a shit for Nature. We withhold even this from Nature.

If we ponder it, we might find it extraordinary. How clear a symbol of misunderstanding, and how telling an expression of the difference between the way humans “think” and the way Nature functions.

I’m lucky enough to have lived for the past year in a place where I have to use a hole in the ground for a toilet, and because of the shadow elements at play, we might the importance of being able to give something back to the Earth, when we in the dominant culture live so much as takers.

When I lived as philosopher in residence at a wild horse sanctuary, my days usually began by collecting the sacred offerings from my equine teachers so that we could compost them. When writing my doctoral dissertation, many of my days began this way—shoveling horse shit—and it was good to be around the horses, to offer them and the Earth some physical labor, and to help the horses do their job, which they would do perfectly well if humans didn’t interfere.

Horses know how to take care of the Earth. They know how to take care of entire ecologies. Human ignorance knows how to break them down.

Human ignorance breaks down ecologies quite explicitly in human activities of building and development. That means the words we use have lost their meaning, and we should change the terms until we have changed the practices.

When humans in the dominant culture speak of development, they mean degradation. When we speak of building, we mean invading and tearing down. That’s what happens. When we develop an area, we degrade its ecologies, often radically.

That makes architecture an artform that maintains the shadow.

Some architects have tried to challenge this in a deep way. The architect Hundertwasser helped pioneer modern eco-art and ecoliteracy in architecture. He perhaps gave birth to the modern notion of a “green roof,” creating veritable forests on and in his buildings.

He said, “Grass and vegetation in the city should grow on all horizontal spaces—that is to say, wherever rain and snow falls vegetation should grow, on the roads and on the roofs,” which sounds like a radical claim.

But all of his buildings integrate rather astonishing levels of plant life—an architecture of viriditas we could say. Viriditas is Saint Hildegard’s term that combines the Latin word veritas, or truth, and the Latin word virdis, or green. Viriditas is the divine spirit flowing in the living things of the world. It’s sacred medicine.

Saint Hildegard was something of an eco-philosopher, eco-artist, and ecosensual sage. She might have appreciated some of Hundertwasser’s ideas and practices.

You might try an internet search for something like “Hundertwasser living roof” (or a similar search phrase) and then click on the images.

In honor of Hundertwasser, you might look him up using Ecosia, the new search engine that donates 80% or more of its profits to reforestation:

ecosia.org

You will see that some of his designs have trees growing inside the buildings, with branches coming out of windows or other deliberate openings.

A moment ago we spoke about toilets. We’ll get to that. First let’s consider some things related to Hundertwasser that begin to help us sense a shadow in architecture, and that may in turn get us to thinking about the shadow in the arts in general.

Hundertwasser wrote a work referred to as his “Mould Manifesto”. Some people have suggested that everything he did was a manifesto, so that we should see his buildings not as “architecture,” but as multi-dimensional manifestoes. In some sense, maybe our contemplations together verge into manifestoes too, in the sense that we seek real change in the world, and we try to align ourselves with wisdom, love, and beauty. Our contemplations are declarations of values, declarations of common ground, common humus.

In his Mould Manifesto, Hundertwasser wrote that painting and sculpture have become liberated in the sense that anyone at all can produce a painting or sculpture and put it on display.

But he said that architecture lacks this freedom. That causes a problem. Hundertwasser says we should see fundamental freedom as a precondition for any art, but architecture requires a degree and a license.

Philosophically, Hundertwasser might be missing a deep point that the spiritual traditions would want us to recognize, namely that art should come from our soul, and not from our encumbered ego—not filtered in anyway through our encumbered ego.

That’s why so many philosophers, going back at least to Socrates and Plato in the dominant culture—but one finds this everywhere, that philosophers and sages have expressed a lot of care about how people make art.

It’s not that we require a formal degree, but that a healthy culture should put everyone in touch with the true sources and purposes of creativity. The dominant culture fails to do that, and requiring a degree and a license does nothing to help the situation.

We could respectfully suggest that Hundertwasser was trying to get at a kind of indigenous notion, that in a healthy culture anyone should be empowered to know how to build a dwelling. Most of us wouldn’t know where to begin if we had to build our own stable dwelling.

Hundertwasser also made it clear that, as he put it, “present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.” That’s a powerful statement. He rubbed it in by saying, “All that has been achieved are detached and pitiable compromises by men of bad conscience who work with straight-edged rulers.”

Hundertwasser recognized that people would have to learn how to build—in order for architecture to become liberated—and he went so far as to acknowledge that a building built by amateurs might collapse. But he claimed it would usually creak beforehand, and thus people would be able to escape. And, after a collapse like that, or hearing of someone else’s collapse, people would then become far better thinkers, and they would think more critically and creatively about their homes.

Hundertwasser claimed that while modern functional architecture seems to have the intention to be constructed for human beings, in practice, this architecture oppresses the human soul.

This may seem melodramatic. But we have philosophical/cultural evidence, as well as dominant culture scientific evidence, that the built environment may oppress the soul. This comes up often in WLB podcasts and blog posts, and it seems worth repeating.

We can begin sense that connectedness to nature may somehow relate to our being more innovative and holistic thinkers. And it seems essential to refer to this as a style of consciousness. Technically, these researchers speak of a cognitive style, but that itself betrays a lack of holistic thinking, which their own study seeks to explore.

We can think of conquest consciousness as a style of consciousness, and we can ask about its level of skill and effectiveness, evaluating this carefully, and including all negative side-effects.

The built environment of the dominant culture contrasts sharply with the built environment of indigenous or more spiritually and ecologically attuned cultures, and those cultures may exhibit more rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty, which goes altogether with the architecture.

In other words, we see feedback loops here: A culture gets ignorant, its architecture then gets ignorant, and the architecture feeds back into the thought patterns of the culture. We see pattern affecting pattern.

This all has to do with our initial recognition: human, humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om.

The built environment cuts us off from humus—from soil and soul—it creates a feedback loop of human privilege and conquest consciousness—those two go together—

it expresses and perpetuates a cut-off existence, cut off from a more immediate sense of the sacredness of the World—

and it expresses and exacerbates a duality between mind and Nature, further obscuring the nature of mind itself.

How then could we ever think at our very best in such false ecologies—the ecologies of most classrooms, offices, courtrooms, and more?

The built environment, or the human-made ecology—seems to go with a style of consciousness that makes us less cooperative, less mindful, less ecologically sustainable, less responsive to wonder and sacredness, less capable of holistic and innovative thinking.

On the other hand, the style of consciousness arising from rootedness in nature seems more innovative, more holistic, more cooperative, more sustainable, more present and aware, more in touch with wonder and sacredness, more available for love and for liberation into larger ecologies of mind.

A group of humans talking inside a building may enact a larger ecology of mind than any of them on their own inside that same building, but the whole group remains cut off from Nature—out of touch with soil and thus their fuller soul, out of touch with wind, water, and fire, out of touch with countless sentient beings who languish in the human shadow—and so the ecologies of mind tend to remain stuck in the human, and—worse yet—stuck in conquest consciousness as a style of thought.

We can reflect on this with care, and we may arrive at the same diagnosis proposed by Hundertwasser: Architecture involves the oppression of the soul—which goes together with oppression of sentient beings, both human and non-human. That’s in the shadow, of course, because consciously the architect may not intend to oppress us. It’s an unconscious directive.

Our architecture, and perhaps much of our other creative work in the dominant culture, arises from and perpetuates the denuding of the human soul and the soul of the World.

Hundertwasser goes on in his “Mould Manifesto” to write that people living in apartments should have the freedom to lean out their windows and transform the exterior of the building as far as their arms can reach. He claimed that people should even be able to change the interiors too, in ways most leases wouldn’t allow.

Hundertwasser didn’t just write about these things. As we noted, he created multi-dimensional manifestoes in the form of buildings. For instance, he created an apartment building called Hundertwasserhaus. He received no payment for it, claiming he wasn’t really an “architect,” and wasn’t particularly “good,” but that others were just so bad, and he didn’t want something even uglier going up in place of his sense of what we need in order to move forward.

You can look that one up on Ecosia as well, and you’ll see that Hundertwasserhaus has trees living in the buildings, as co-inhabitants with their own windows even,

and the humans and trees can decorate their windows as they see fit.

The building includes nonlinear, undulating walls and floors.

Interestingly, the tenants of Hundertwasserhaus reportedly have better overall health, and their children do better in school compared with other apartment dwellers.

Hundertwasser’s Mould Manifesto says the following: “The time has come for people to rebel against their confinement in cubical constructions like chickens or rabbits in cages, a confinement which is alien to human nature. Such a cage or utility construction is a building alien to the nature of all three groups of [people] having to do with it…”

What are the three groups? The architects, the builders, and the inhabitants. Hundertwasser said the architects don’t have a vitalizing relationship with the building, because they have bad ideas, of course, but also because they don’t know who will move in to an apartment building they design. Then the bricklayers and carpenters and so on don’t have any vitalizing relationship either, because they can only follow the plans, and cannot make changes based on their own moral or aesthetic judgments. Finally, the tenants have not participated at all. They didn’t lay a single brick or design a single element. They just get moved in like livestock.

Hundertwasser says we need a holy trinity. He specifically compares the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a trinity with the architect, builders, and tenants, and he says we need to regain our creativity, and apparently our soul and our sense of sacredness.

Hundertwasser thus confronts, among other things, a fierce element in the shadow of dominant culture art and architecture: The ego of the artist. We might say that the ego of the artist isn’t in the shadow, but in fact it is, because what we don’t admit is that the egocentrism of art has consequences.

A more ecologically and spiritually skillful creative process decenters the ego, and a decentered ego leads to very different kinds of results. Thus we should see this kind of art as revolutionary in the authentic sense.

Any serious practice of decentering the ego must abide by spiritual and ecological principles and thus become a spiritual and ecological path.

We have no ethical alternative, for this seems the best way of rooting the path in ethics, and bringing together ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, politics, economics, metaphysics, and all the rest.

We can say all of this together counts as ecology in the fullest sense, and it means the nonduality of Nature and Culture. Right now, Nature mostly stands in the shadow of the dominant Culture. As Freud put it so well, in language that should shock and sadden us in its truth, “the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’ȇtre, is to defend us against nature” (19).

You can find that in the book published as Future of an Illusion, and it shows the conflict inherent in the dominant culture. Freud portrays civilization as a state of war with the necessities of life, thus putting ourselves at war with ourselves—because we have no time to listen, to learn, to feel, to sense, to attune with Nature.

The egocentric mind is a mind of conflict and incoherence, and the shadow contains the items of conflict the ego wants to keep repressed. We need to examine the shadow of art, including architecture, to see what it represses.

Artists seeking to enhance their ecosensual awareness, artists seeking to become more ecologically skillful, realistic, ethical, and graceful—we could say, artists seeking to become more ecoliterate—need to face these sorts of concerns.

The art of a “doer,” the art of a “personal” “vision,” the art of “personal” “expression,” and all the other habits we have cultivated in the dominant culture has begun to reveal its ignorance. That’s scary.

And it’s intimidating to ask how we might do things in a new way—not an innovation of the pattern of insanity, not merely novel or clever or pretty or “ingenious” art and culture in general—but thoroughly new art and culture—

Thoroughly new in the sense that we finally attune ourselves with the way Nature functions, we finally practice and realize the nature of mind and the mind of Nature,

we finally liberate ourselves into larger ecologies of mind that include the oppressed—human and non-human—in a manner consonant with mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, mutual care and reverence, and mutual liberation.

We are talking about the essence of freedom here, the essence of art, the essence of mind and Nature.

We got to thinking about these things because of Hundertwasser’s notion of the holy trinity, uniting the architects, the builders, and the people living in a dwelling. One might wonder how he actually put the ideal of the holy trinity into practice.

The owner of the only Hundertwasser creation on Turtle Island gives us some insight. Carl Doumani, owner of Quixote Winery, managed to get Hundertwasser to collaborate with him. The winery is not far north of where I have been living for the past few years, and it has langured on the list of places I’d like to go if I can only find a way to make the fossil fuel use sensible. Driving almost 5 hours roundtrip to drink wine and look at a building doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s worth contemplating the architecture even from a distance.

In an interview for a piece on Hundertwasser that appeared in the NYT, Doumani related his impression of Hundertwasser’s practice. He said,

“The genius of the guy is, he brings the craftsmen into the process. He always asks, ‘What would you do here?’ And they’d be proud of their choices. On weekends the carpenters, tile guys and plasterers working on the job—they’d be here with their wives or girlfriends, showing them what they’re working on.”

Isn’t that interesting? We touch here the importance of releasing our work into a larger ecology of mind. This not only allows for more creative potential, but it aligns that creative potential with wisdom, love, and beauty. Hundertwasser could have been far more ecologically sophisticated than he was, but he took some distinctive steps in a good direction.

We could say that, in a kind of default and often unconscious way, Humans treat art like a personal possession of humans or humanity. But, to spiral onward, let us say again: human, humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om.

Human art belongs to the Earth, to the humus, to the community of life, to sacredness, to the whole Cosmos. In humility, we sense our work as sacred activity in service to all sentient beings, upon whose own creative activity our human lives wholly depend.

Birds make the world beautiful, and their art—their cosmetics, adornments, and architecture, their songs and dances, their auguries and countless synchronicities—all their sacred art makes our life possible. What song do we sing back to them? What do we do to open the leaves to breathing, to open the book of a new day to learning, to open the sky of spaciousness for them?

Sentient beings gift us to life, and gift us our lives, in song and color, in taste and texture. They wonder our senses—

and LoveWisdom begins in wonder.

They are the beginning of our philosophy of life. We find our spiritual roots in them, as well as our creative intelligence.

Do we ask them about their vision of the World? Do we allow them to co-create the World, or do we do what we want, and expect them to accept the consequences—consequences we ourselves rarely think deeply enough to foresee?

We march along to the drumbeat of manipulation and control, even though we cannot control life, cannot control Nature in her basic wildness, which is our basic nature too.

Hundertwasser calls out our habits of manipulation and control in many ways, including a passage about our use of straight lines. He writes,

Also criminal is the use of ruler and T-square in architecture, which, as can be easily proved, have become instruments of the breakdown of the architectural trinity. Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

On one razor blade I counted 546 straight lines. By imagining linear connections to another razor blade of the same manufacturing process, which surely looks exactly the same, this yields 1,090 straight lines, and adding on the packaging, the result is about 3,000 straight lines from the same blade.

Not all that long ago, possession of the straight line was a privilege of royalty, the wealthy, and the clever. Today every idiot carries millions of straight lines around in his pants pockets.

Any modern architecture in which the straight line or the geometric circle have been employed for only a second – and were it only in spirit – must be rejected. Not to mention the design, drawing-board and model-building work which has become not only pathologically sterile, but absurd. The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating line. In it, God and the human spirit are less at home than the comfort-craving, brainless intoxicated and unformed masses.

This brings to mind some lyrics I wrote for the same novel I mentioned before. The You in these lyrics is the Beloved. For philosophers in the lineage of the Greeks, the Beloved is Sophia.

I keep a crude watch on this soul of mine

I keep my heart well-guarded all the time

I leave these ends out so they catch and bind

When You’re not mine, I draw the line

When I’m alone and don’t know what to do

I get abstract instead of loving You

I take a metaphor as a stubborn truth

When You’re not mine, I cut the line

When I’m in darkness thinking that it’s light

When I’m wrong but it feels like I am right

When I make suff’ring a source of my delight

When You’re not mine, I push the line

You have a way to keep me by your side

Even though I try to run and hide

If I could stand still I might turn the tide

Until You’re mine, I crawl the line

A wise man told me I could turn it all

He said I’d leap and You would catch my fall

“Just go straight,” he said, “and stop this desperate crawl!”

To make You mine, I’ll drop the line

The rhyming creates a need for poetic irony. Obviously, to anyone in the mystical traditions of the dominant culture, one can never make the Beloved “mine,” but we do use that leitmotif in the poetry of the dominant culture.

But nothing belongs to us as a personal possession. Everything belongs to everything. Hundertwasser wanted architecture to try and acknowledge that, to acknowledge impermanence and interwovenness:

When rust sets in on a razor blade, when a wall starts to get mouldy, when moss grows in a corner of a room, rounding its geometric angles, we should be glad because, together with the microbes and fungi, life is moving into the house and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn.

In an addendum to the “Mould Manifesto,” Hundertwasser wrote:

Today’s architecture is criminally sterile. For unfortunately, all building activity ceases at the very moment when man “takes up quarters”, but normally building activity should not begin until man moves in. We are outrageously robbed of our humanity by defiling dictates and criminally forced not to make any changes or additions to façades, the layout or interiors, either in colour, structure, or masonry. Even tenant-owned dwellings are subject to censorship (see building-inspection regulations and lease statutes). The characteristic thing about prisons, cages or pens is the prefabricated “a-priori” structure, the definitive termination of building activity prior to the prisoner’s or animal’s moving in to a structure which is innately incompatible to [them], coupled with the categorical restriction that the inmate may change nothing in this, “his” housing, which has been imposed upon him.

In that same essay, Hundertwasser mentions some buildings that he finds much healthier. He includes the work of Gaudí in Barcelona, The Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the Ideal Palace of the Postman named Ferdinand Cheval—if you haven’t heard of that one you might want to look it up, it’s an incredible building handmade by a postman based on a dream. It took him 33 years, and he didn’t start until he was 43.

Hundertwasser also includes Indigenous buildings, illegal house building in the U.S., and the houseboats in Sausalito, California. It was on one of those boats that Otis Redding composed the song, Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.

In a later addendum, he added: “The architect’s only function should be that of technical advisor, i.e., answering questions regarding materials, stability, etc.”

One contemporary architect working in the spirit of Hundertwasser, is Mike Reynolds. Reynolds pioneered what he calls Earthship Biotecture. This form of architecture uses upcycled, recycled, and local materials as far as possible. An Earthship can be completely off-grid as well, and holds the ideal of serving as a functioning ecosystem. This contrasts sharply with dominant culture architecture, which puts a dead box anywhere it wants to, and then finds a way to hook up an artificial life support system.

This often serves to cut us off from ecological and spiritual realities, and it ends up degrading the world and creating dangers for us all. We saw for instance what can happen when a winter storm shuts down the power grid. People can freeze to death, and they may have no way to cook food, and in some cases no way to get to food.

An ideal Earthship has food growing inside and outside of it, and an ideal Earthship can maintain a comfortable temperature year-round. An ideal Earthship even finds a way to make the sewage from the house usable as compost.

Those are the ideals. Like Hundertwasser, Reynolds seems more of a manifesto builder. He experimented a lot, and the need for experimentation caused a lot of problems for him. But he did some incredibly important work.

It’s possible that the very leading edge of ecoliterate architecture has surpassed the Earthship brand, but it still gives us a lot of food for thought.

And the mention of sewage brings us back to Hundertwasser’s vision. One of Hundertwasser’s texts has gotten the nickname of the Holy Shit Manifesto. I’ll read an excerpt of it for you:

Every time we use the flush toilet

we think it is a hygienic accomplishment

but in fact we violate cosmic law

Because, in truth, it is an immoral act

a wicked act of death

It is as if we draw a dead line

When we use the toilet

we lock ourselves in

and flush our shit away

Why are we ashamed?

What are we afraid of?

[ . . . .]

IF WE DO NOT TREASURE OUR SHIT

AND IF WE DO NOT TRANSFORM IT INTO HUMUS

IN HONOUR OF GOD AND THE WORLD

WE LOSE OUR RIGHT

TO BE PRESENT ON THIS EARTH

IN THE NAME OF OBSOLETE AND WRONG SANITARY LAWS

WE LOSE OUR COSMIC SUBSTANCE

WE MURDER AND DESTROY OUR FUTURE LIFE

DIRT IS LIFE

STERILE CLEANNESS IS DEATH

You shall not kill

but we sterilize all life with poison and a layer of concrete

This is murder

[ . . . .]

We pray before we eat and say grace afterwards

but we do not pray when we shit

WE THANK GOD FOR OUR DAILY BREAD

WHICH COMES OUT OF THE EARTH

BUT WE DO NOT PRAY

SO THAT OUR SHIT BECOMES EARTH AGAIN

WASTE IS BEAUTIFUL

TO DIVIDE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF WASTE

AND TO REINTEGRATE THEM INTO THE CYCLE

IS A HAPPY OCCUPATION, FULL OF JOY

[ . . . .]

WE HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO BE WITNESSES

OF HOW, BY OUR OWN WISDOM

OUR OWN WASTE, OUR OWN SHIT TURNS BACK INTO HUMUS

IT IS LIKE A HARVEST WHICH IS RIPENING

LIKE A TREE WHICH GROWS

AT HOME AS IF IT WAS OUR OWN SON

HOMO - HUMUS - HUMANITAS

three words, the same origin, the same destiny

He could have also added humility. And to show Hundertwasser still remained willing to try and work within current structures (we have far less, if any, luxury there at this point), Hundertwasser’s final project was, however ironically, a public toilet—in Aotearoa New Zealand. He visited Aotearoa, fell in love with the place, bought a farm, obtained citizenship, lived out the rest of his life, and was buried there under a tree.

Despite his concession to our ignorance, Hundertwasser nevertheless challenges our dualism around the sacred and the profane, the moral and the not moral, and he straightforwardly asks us to inquire into the fear and anxiety that keeps these dualities in place.

Drawing “a dead line” . . . sounds familiar. And we may be reminded here of a few other figures. First of all, we could bring St. Hildegard to mind again. She wrote,

“Do not mock anything God has created. All creation is simple, plain and good. And God is present throughout his creation. Why do you ever consider things beneath your notice? God’s justice is to be found in every detail of what he has made. The human race alone is capable of injustice. Human beings alone are capable of disobeying God’s laws, because they try to be wiser than God.”

She also wrote that “God loans all of creation to humankind for our use, the high, the low, the everything. If we misuse this privilege, God’s justice gives creation permission to offer humankind a reminder.”

We’re getting a reminder.

Two other figures come to mind as well: Paracelsus and Zhuangzi. Paracelsus, the famous alchemist, reportedly began his teaching appointment at the University of Basel by placing a pot of human excrement on the table and saying, “This is what the work is about, this is life, this is God.”

And Zhuangzi, the great Doaist sage, gives us this story:

Master Dung-kuo asked Zhuangzi, “This thing called the Way (Dao)—where does it exist?”

Zhuangzi said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”

“Come,” said Master Dung-kuo, “you must be more specific!”

“It is in the ant.”

“As low a thing as that?”

“It is in the panic grass.”

“But that’s lower still!”

“It is in the tiles and shards.”

“How can it be so low?”

“It is in the piss and shit!”

Master Dung-kuo made no reply.

I often point out that I know of no dominant culture philosophers who wrote philosophical guidance for going to the toilet. The world philosopher Dogen, great sage of Japan, wrote such guidance, along with guidance on cleaning our teeth, cooking meals and eating them. Dogen may have disagreed with Zhuangzi about some things, but he certainly would agree that “it’s in the piss and shit”.

Dogen once appeared before his students and said:

Mind is fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles, and Buddha is a glob of mud or a clump of soil.

Finding that mind doesn’t demand going up on a mountain, but it does demand a rupture, a radical break with the pattern of insanity of the dominant culture. It can begin as simply as how we relate to our own shit, including all the shadow material of our psyche, both “collective” and “individual”.

Dogen wrote a teaching on “Cleansing,” as well as a teaching on “Washing the Face”. That’s a sage worth listening to, one who talks about how to clean up.

What is dirt? What is cleanliness?

Dogen’s teaching on Cleansing includes a detailed account of using the latrine—detailed in terms of carrying a hand towel, how to arrange it, how to bow, and so on. It’s kind of amazing, and worth reading.

Dogen teaches in this essay that the practice and the realization that fully enlightened ancestors have guarded and maintained is called nondefilement. Nondefilement. That’s not easy, but it’s the whole of the spiritual path that all the enlightened sages of the past have cared for and handed down to us.

Dogen says that even if the body and mind are undefiled, we still have to take care of them, and we have specific practices for cleansing the body and cleansing the mind.

Now here’s the key: He makes it immediately ecological and cosmic, because he says this is not just about cleansing the body and mind, but cleansing the entire land, and cleansing the places [of sitting] under trees, which means the places of resting and meditating.

Dogen says that, Even if the land isn’t polluted, cleansing it is still the intention of all enlightened beings. They never turn their back on it or give it up, even if they become totally enlightened.

But he says, “The essential meaning of cleansing is difficult to fathom. The method [of cleansing] is itself the essential meaning. Attaining the way is the method.”

That’s one hell of a method. He means attaining enlightenment is the method, attaining wisdom, love, and beauty is the method.

Dogen makes everything Cosmic, and he throws fresh, cold water on our sleepy ego, to help clean and purify us.

Our dualistic, conquest consciousness has meanings and habits and encrustations built up around “cleaning”. Dogen says: Please put all that aside . . . If cleansing were easy to wonderstand, we wouldn’t have all this mess in our heads and in our World.

How else do we get polluted rivers, lakes, and—heaven help us—polluted oceans, unless human beings have a tragic and astonishing misunderstanding of cleansing, including such notions as “pure” and “impure,” “clean” and “dirty”? The impure things often end up in the shadow. But in countless ways, proper cleaning ends up in the shadow too, because we have confused minds, and only a fully awakened mind understands cleaning.

That’s why our cleaning products often pollute rivers and oceans. While human beings clean, they make the world dirty, degraded, and impure. We speak of throwing things away, but there is no away. We can’t flush anything away.

We need the kind of honesty Dogen provides. We need this kind of confrontation with our shadow, with our whole mess and messiness.

In case we think he’s kidding, Dogen clarifies, and he makes it intimate. It has to do with right now. Right now, we wash our hands or we use our hands, we wash our paint brush or paint our canvas, we wash our tea cup or pour tea for a friend, we wash our bottom or sit under a tree . . . and in this right now—beyond past, present, and future—in this right now, we meet reality, realizing the nature of mind and the mind of Nature. Right now, we touch our own wildness.

Dogen teaches the following,

Water is not necessarily pure or impure by origin. The body is not necessarily pure or impure by origin. All things are like this. Water is not sentient or insentient. The body is not sentient or insentient. All things are like this.

Dogen goes into detail about how to wash our bottom if we happen to be meditating outside under a tree, near a river, just as Buddha did, and we need to defecate. He describes how we would make balls of dirt, and line them up in two rows of seven balls of dirt to use the dirt to clean our hands and body afterward.

In the context of describing this, he relates a story about Shariputra, who was one of the Buddha’s most exceptional students. Dogen tells us about a time when Shariputra converted someone while cleaning himself up after defecating. Dogen says that this was not what Shariputra sought to do, or what the person who saw him was seeking, but that it happened because of Shariputra’s awesome presence, a presence maintained in this potentially impure activity.

Shariputra has the status in Buddhism of an apostle in Christianity. So, this would be like saying, “One time, a total heathen saw St. Peter washing up after defecating, and he converted.” Or, imagine that Saul on the road to Damascus had actually come across a Christian Saint defecating, and that had led to his conversion. It may sound blasphemous, but the very point is that a Saint is not impure when defecating, nor did God make any part of his creation impure. The question has to do with how we practice our life, and how we practice our philosophy of life, which we may call a religion or not.

And also part of the point here is that these things present challenges to our dualistic mind. When we read Dogen in English, we can think we know what he says. But since Dogen invites us into total intimacy with our lives, our wonderstanding can only come if we go line by line, usually with a lot of meditation practice.

These few lines about Shariputra could teach us a lot. The way to work with them is to hold the image in our hearts, like holding a candle outside on a dark stormy night. We have to keep the flame protected from the wind.

Similarly, we keep Dogen’s words, in this case an image, protected from the storms of distraction, including merely intellectual musing.

We could say that suffering means distraction. That’s it. If we didn’t get distracted from our own true nature and the nature of reality, if we didn’t get distracted away from Nature and wildness and sacredness, we would never suffer.

We would still get sick, we would still lose people we love, we would still have to die. But all this would happen as part of our indestructible awakeness, and we wouldn’t ever suffer it, even if we felt pain or sadness.

We are pausing to marvel at Shariputra. Can any of us imagine this? What a wild thing Dogen tells us here: Shariputra practiced and realized such an awesome presence, that some person with a fixed set of beliefs who had no interest in Shariputra’s philosophy of life, saw Shariputra cleaning his bottom and said, “What the hell is going on here? What kind of person is this?”

Can any of us imagine standing in the presence of someone so utterly unashamed of themselves—not merely shameless or insensitive or crass, but someone totally accepting and unashamed of themselves, and thus totally accepting of us too? What would it be like to meet a person like that?

We have such a hard time accepting ourselves that some of what we can’t accept goes into the unconscious. That in itself seems hilarious, because we already have so many conscious things about ourselves that we find it hard to truly accept, and then we can only imagine what we might have in our unconscious, in our shadow.

Our shit is at least partially in our shadow. Doegn has us face it, without getting distracted. He gives a detailed account of cleansing the body, inviting us to practice and realize our own awesome presence in the world, and even including affirmations to guide us, like this verse from the Flower Garland Sutra that monks should recite when washing their hands:

Washing my hands with water,

may all sentient beings

attain excellent hands

for maintaining the teachings for awakening.

And Dogen emphasizes that anyone who fails to cleanse properly is not allowed to participate in the community.

And it’s not just about permission. If we human don’t learn the deep and true meaning of cleanliness, and face our shadows more fully, we will not be allowed to participate in the community of life, because it will fall apart.

Before we conclude, I’d like to consider a passage from Jung. In his MDR, he writes about a powerful experience in his childhood. He tells us that one lovely day he came out of school and went to the cathedral square.

He says the shine shone brightly and the sky had a beautiful blue color. And as he stood there looking at the cathedral roof, glittering with its new and brightly glazed tiles, he felt overwhelmed with the beauty of it all.

He thought to himself: “The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and...”

Suddenly he experienced a hole in his own thoughts, and then a choking sensation took hold of him. He felt numb and the only thing he knew was that he had to stop thinking. He knew something terrible was coming in his thoughts, something too horrible to think, and he had to stop.

Jung does a wonderful job exploring the tension he experienced over the next few days as he struggled valiantly to stop this thought. He felt God was testing him. He tried so passionately to stop the thought, but he knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. It’s a wonderful few pages, and the story builds a beautiful psychic tension leading up to the key moment when Jung musters all of his courage. He feels he is about to leap into the fires of hell as he lets the thought come:

He sees before him the cathedral and the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world—and then, and then . . . from under the throne a gigantic turd falls down on the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and smashes the walls of the cathedral.

Jung describes feeling not just relief, but bliss. He felt bliss the likes of which he had never known in his young life, and he cried tears of joy and gratitude.

In confronting this shadowy thought Jung felt he had received a great revelation that allowed him to understand many things he hadn’t previously understood. But it also raised questions.

To wrap up our contemplation, I’d like to admit that singing was in my shadow for a long time. That might be because we never had much music in our home, and at one point I told my mother that Elvis had died because of all the singing he did. Consequently, I never learned how to sing, and to this day, I can’t really do it.

But that novel I mentioned has quite a few songs. Some are total originals, others a kind of spiritual pastiche using old melodies.

We’ll close with a song that takes inspiration from a strange statistic. I once heard that, in the first 35 years of life, a person consumes, and thus excretes, 32 thousand pounds of matter. If you know your maths and measures, you know that comes to about 16 tons. This calculation was done many years ago, and I’d bet the number is higher now amongst the most vigorous consumers.

The song references Zorba the Greek, and the author of that novel was from the same village on the island of Crete where my father was born and grew up. The author of the novel Zorba the Greek is Nikos Kazantzakis, and I am nikos patedakis. Greek names that end in kis usually indicate a lineage from Crete. In the novel, Zorba had spent some time as a miner, digging lignite, sometimes referred to as brown coal.

The main launching point of the song though is the idea that we consume and excrete 16 tons of material in our first 35 years of life, which used to be considered the entrance into midlife and the beginning of the kind of spiritual yearning that by that time in our lives we only avoid by making ourselves unhappy.

Here’s the song:

16 tons, and wha’d ya get?

35 years, and a mountain of shit

it’s the weight of the wake

that we leave behind

whether strong Buddha-nature

or weak monkey mind

16 tons is also what goes in

a little more if you’re heavy

a little less if you’re thin.

Don’t take a rhyme

as the literal truth,

this is not just food,

it’s the source

of the tooth.

Swallow 16 tons,

and wha’d ya get?

35 years,

a mountain of shit.

You could be dead

by the end of this song:

Will you wake up now,

or will you wait too long?

You may have seen the Buddha

with a big round gut,

he’s laughin’ with you,

but laughin’ at what?

In a flash he puts his heart

on your endless ache,

the tears well up,

your body quakes.

Consume 16 tons—

wha’d ya get?

35 years,

a mountain of shit.

You could be dead

before the end of this song:

Will you wake up now,

or will you wait too long?

My granddad dug

the black coal in the mine,

Zorba dug lignite,

Buddha dug Mind.

They breathed in the dust

of this human life,

they ate up the joys

and drank up the strife.

It came to 16 tons

every thirty-five years,

the tailings are bindings,

desires and fears.

Zorba loved women,

and grandad wine,

Buddha danced it all

with a ten foot spine.

A Buddha that tall

won’t fit in a shaft,

but he can squeeze through a keyhole

and unlock a laugh.

The star of the morning

twinkled his eye,

he shook his light head

and said, “Me oh my . . .

“Every being here’s awakened,

But no one’s been told,

They all act sleepy,

They’re all gettin’ old.

With the shovel of attention

They could tunnel out of bed—

I hope they start diggin’

Before they’re dead.”

You load ton after ton . . .

and wha’d ya get?

Older and older,

more and more shit.

You could drop dead

as I finish this sooooooooooooooooooooooooong . . .

Wake up now!

Don’t wait

too

long.

If you have questions or reflections about this contemplation, send them in through WLB.org, and we might consider them in a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them. And don’t flush them down the toilet.