Full contact means wholeness

Having published so much recently, I’ve been thinking about my voice. I have a tendency to go abstract when I start talking about ideas that I think are important.

I’ve been reeling between “this is all intellectualising and useless” and trying to drag it forward with some more personal elements.

It led me to write another introduction to the idea of Full-Contact Living:

When I was young I felt drawn to the depths. I haunted subcultures—first, as a hacker hanging out in IRC rooms, and then as a metalhead playing bass guitar, then as an anarchist trying to identify the source of social inequities, and later as someone drawn to esoteric spirituality as a means of transformation. (I say esoteric here because “being spiritual” is pretty normal these days; the kind of practices I was embarking upon were not.)

The depths for me were synonymous with the inner world: this hazy, ambiguous horizon from which everything arose and through which everything had to travel to meet me. And this inner world was synonymous with a different kind of knowing, something beyond abstract knowledge or fact.

Most people didn’t seem to care much about it. I felt that the inner turbulence and mystery that I experienced were simply not recognised. I felt like the usual recipes for success rang hollow. I suffered and wondered if there was anything beyond this. I was entranced with the possibility of transformation, especially after reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising.

John Vervaeke pioneered the term “Meaning Crisis” to describe the root of the ecological, mental health and political crises we see around us. He notes that in response to this Meaning Crisis, we see the rise of interest in meditation, mindfulness, psychedelics, Stoicism, philosophy and more. A wisdom revival.

These are practices that lead us to the depths.

There is something vital in the depths. But it’s easy to get lost in them, especially when we’re new. This is often because we come to the depths through frustration or desperation. We are famished, and so we gobble up ideas without discrimination, trying to fill a hole.

Leave the mainstream behind, take the red pill and blow your mind open. Much of the dialogue in these areas is focused on disrupting the default and yet struggles to build something better in its place.

It’s important to remember that the depths are never just the depths. They depend on the shallows for their definition. The lake is the lake, whether we’re talking about the depths or the shallows. It’s all the same body of water.

Seeing the lake for what it is, is wholeness.

Full-Contact Living is an appreciation of wholeness: living an active, virtuous life on the surface, whilst embracing the mystery of the depths. Navigating the knowledge and routines of life, whilst also acclimating to the ambiguity and mystery of this conscious experience.

We can’t leave either behind. Nor do I want to.