I want to help people … but not in a familiar way. I want to wake them up, shake them up, rock them to their core, make it impossible for them to remain asleep any longer. There’s too much happening now for that … too much at stake.

The old ways no longer work …
not the old, old ways or the new, old ways.

The old, old ways are nostalgic for sure … they are encapsulated in the ancient cosmologies and the religious systems that arose from them. It’s not that they are wrong, or even incorrect in some way, it’s just simply that they no longer work. They weren’t and aren’t designed for these times … we need new cosmologies, plural.

The old, old ways are about making sense of a supernatural world … manifesting gods and powers that rule the things we cannot, do not, understand. Whether it’s the animistic gods of nature … thunder, lightning, fire, water, earth or air … or the pagan gods that animate all things living and the unliving too … these manifestations no longer fit with the intentions and outcomes we hold for ourselves, the species, the planet … despite the way these gods and powers represented life itself.

The old, old gods matured into the formalized religions … coalescing and coming together into the great monotheistic religions that swept the ancient world away and brought down the cosmology of nature … establishing cosmologies of power … an Aristotlean world of rationality and hierarchies. These cosmologies had all on bended knee before those who held the power of these great gods, pharaohs and emperors of the next age … the priests, rabbis and imams that followed in their exalted footsteps. These “servants of the old gods” continue to exert their power in the world today … twisting the story of life into one of death more often than not.

The worship of the old gods is the worship of death … of better things to come in the afterlife, regardless of the cost to the pulse of life in this one. Yet the old ways are not without redemption, once you get beyond the distortions of those who would use them to their own ends. There is a message of love in the heart of each of them … but to reach that part of the message you must kill the buddhas you meet on the road along the way.

Some of the oldest gods have morphed into something more than the gods themselves, a kind of sacred unity that itself is inhuman. The desire to transcend our humanity blaring from every rooftop telling us that we are not this … flesh, bone and blood … but the spirit contained within. We are to deny our incarnate selves if we seek to follow these ways, rejecting all that we experience as real … including the touch and breath of those we love and cherish because these too are only illusion.

At the very least the gods of the immortal, eternal spirit that transcend the duality of this and that, I and Thou, demand that you relieve yourself of the illusion that you exist, that any of “this” and “that” … our sensate experience … is real in any way. According to this way, they themselves, the gods of the immortal, eternal spirt are part of the illusion, and all of this is but a projection of pure consciousness that manifests itself.Fascinating stuff, but I question how useful in cleaning up the oceans, rivers and lakes that slake our thirst, saving the diversity of life on the planet or feeding the starving children of the world.

No this is not about the old, old ways …
or the gods that occupy them either.

My desire transcends the limits of the new, old ways … the revival of a desire to satisfy the incarnate, to live again … to rise from the darkness of the dark age following the old, old ways of worshiping death had birthed. If we seek to live we must transcend death while we are alive. This, of course, was the basic message promised by the old, old ways … but that leave us wanting unless we transcend them, and the rituals, traditions and superstitions that emerged along with them. We must take the essential message of the old, old ways to heart and live for the love they promise, … a purer love that speaks to the pulse of life itself … a love that is not about self, or a lusting for other … or worse, more.

This isn’t an appeal to the Goddess Gaia or some other revisioning of the old, old ways … nor is it about  the life blood of the new, old ways, i.e.: self-interest, that we are now buried beneath. The drive to remain entertained and amused … the hedonistic throb that all that is meaningful is pleasurable, organizes much of the existential experience of modernity.  Hedonism, or worse the idea that we are the most meaningful thing of all … slipping into solipsism suggesting that we are all there is and therefore contain meaning itself within the limits of our personal experience, threatens to extinguish any possibility of our redemption among the living, breathing, pulse of the planet.

We raise cathedrals to self-interest in the buildings that scrape the skies in honor of those that have raped the planet and her people of their dignity, as well as their wealth …

We make heroes out of those that sit in the spires of these cathedrals, worshiping at the wonder of their ability to accumulate all abundance unto themselves, while others lie freezing at the entrance of the buildings they occupy …

And most walk by, zombified by the terror and overwhelm of a system corrupt with the desire for more, and dying from the lack of enough.

These new, old ways see the stream of progress as a linear line moving ever forward, limitless in possibility as long as you have already made it … or seek to sit alongside those who have. All and everything is for the taking. There are no distinctions about what is a resource to be used … everything is to be owned … and, all is capital, including the people who suffer in the caverns of commerce.Progress and slavery always go hand in hand, bedfellows through time. The prime directive is private possession, and held in that lens everything is property … even the children who are yet unborn, and will pay for the debts of their parents who care not for their future, or the life denied.

So what then is beyond the old, old ways and the new, old ways that have superseded them???

A way that speaks to the cosmologies of today … cosmologies of complexity, cybernetics and systems that transcend singularities and single paths to Valhalla, Nirvana or Heaven.

The cosmos has exploded beyond the visible … the Milky Way that so transfixed our ancestors has become but a smaller galaxy among many … too numerous to count in a single lifetime. We have transcended … whether we like it or not, we are no longer alone with ourselves or even with others that we call our own … our families, tribes and communities, even our nations, can no longer contains us. We contain multitudes and must adopt a new role for the survival of the species, and to all that we are responsible to and for, neither sacrificing ourselves or the many … and not least those without a voice to speak for themselves … we now live in the age of the Lorax.

Survival insists that we embrace the paradox of this and that, both and neither … without comprise accept what is “real” within the limits of our incarnate selves, and yet simultaneously not being deceived by the limits of our incarnation. We are stretched by forces that are beyond us to become more than ourselves.

Before there is any confusion … I am not claiming that we become like gods ourselves, nor that we give up the worshiping of the gods if that fulfills the desire you must learn to restrain so that you can give yourself over to that which is greater than yourself.

The “way” I propose is not a path … rather it is something more than any path could offer or promise. It is not a cosmology, but many among many, like the galaxies that comprise the Universe as we know it. 

The way I propose is many ways … many paths … many ways of knowing. 

My way is an offer to dismantle “THE WAY” … to loosen any one hold on reality, and open the possibility to seeing from many perspectives in simultaneity. The way I propose is not this or that, and not even this and that … it is both and neither, it is the paradox itself.

I want to help people …
in ways that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. 

I want to help people to embrace and engage chaos, the birthplace of the gods themselves, and beyond that eros birthing a new cosmos into being. 

This is the domain of uncertainty, and to enter requires you are set free of the certainty that you know at all … beginning with the certainty that you know the you that you know yourself to be, so that you might become that which you are before that particular illusion was thrust upon you.

My work is paradoxical … like music, strumming something into being that cannot be contained in words or ordinary ways of knowing, or the dance that cannot be adequately described, but is nonetheless unfailingly felt. 

It is unsettling to the status quo held by the tomes of words that have birthed the world as we know to be, and offering something that can only be known at a personal, profound and deep level in an incarnate way … this is cardinal knowledge … attained by the mutable spirt free to embrace the fixed knowing of the past without being constrained by it.

In this new way … a cosmology of “unknowing” can emerge as cloud on the horizon … coming into being from nothingness, drenching the knower standing solidly rooted, so they can bloom again before withering in an unceasing cycle, and carried on the wind to be burned away by the flames of the sun lighting the skies above and quickening all below.

There is really nothing new I seek, only a reconciliation of what has been with what seems to be … so that becoming can begin anew again.

So as not to be too obscure, or Joycean in my wake,
I shall attempt to make my INTENT clear …

The way I seek is mythologically informed. It is a way of the unformed spirit, uncontained and incarnate, acting in the world on behalf of self and other, as well as all. The acts of the spirit in this way are not limited by time or space, but transcend them … looking to the past as inspiration free of regulation, while looking to the future for illumination about what will come to pass … knowing that we are the titans of tomorrow, bringing into being that which will be.

This way … the mythic way … is both informed and unformed, forming itself again and again, in the iterative, recursive cycle containing chaos and uncertainty … sacrificing neither self nor other to either. It is the aesthetic way, trusting in the sensate and sensual, more than the mentate and intellectual.

Acting with certainty in the face of chaos means letting go of outcomes, and accepting the emergent … the mythic way I embody merges with the emergent, and revels in the entanglement that follows. The aesthetic form that arises from this meeting and mating preforms action that is aligned both with what is and what will be … it is adumbrative and uncertain, but irresistible … a force of nature you will become.

Beyond the New Age desire for magic and a penchant for magical thinking that so often accompanies it, the aesthetic view is the alchemical revelation of the “lapis philosophorum” for a newer age, attached to the realization that the search is itself the discovery. Renewing the “direct knowing” of the mystic may once again re-enchant the world and those residing on it. This is the “chintamani” revealing the Bodhi … stealing back the sacred fire of knowledge as the sole the province of the gods and offering it again to mere mortals … like the living fire Prometheus stole to warm hands and hearths, this fire re-enlivens the heart and soul.

The old ways are withering and the only real question is:
What resides in the abyss of creation waiting to be released???

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, New Jersey

P.S.: Let me be plain … if you’d like to work with me directly I’d like to make that possible.

My work is actually rather simple at it’s most basic level … I help people “get on with it” … if they are stuck, I help them get unstuck and begin taking action … if they are taking action already but not succeeding in the way they would like yet, I help them smooth out their action and make it more effortless, more elegant … in any case the work we’ll do together will help you to move forward in your life, on your own and with others.

I’ve put together a simple, inexpensive program where I work with people 1-to-1 in a very powerful way, if you’d like to learn more please look here and see if it’s for you:
 1-to-1 Virtual Remote Coaching/Mentoring Program

P.P.S.: You can also still get some very nice bonuses if the program fits your needs right now, and if you have any questions before you begin I’d be happy to spend  a few minutes clearing them up beforehand so you can make your decision with complete confidence …
1-to-1 Virtual Remote Coaching/Mentoring Program