Am “I” “privileged”?
Totally!
I’m the luckiest motherfucker alive!!
An entire multiverse is given to me in every nanosecond and I don’t have to do anything to earn it.
It simply spontaneously appears.
A literal infinite playground on which to dance whatever dance I wish to dance appears spontaneously every nanosecond.
In perfect clarity, with unimaginable precision and detail.
It’s gorgeous as fuck brah!!
If you look closely the same is also true for YOU and every other person — most don’t notice this though.
On a more relative level: Was “I” born into a “privileged” life situation?
Yes, 100%, I was!!
I could easily point out that there is no “I” and that we are all actually the One experiencing every possible life circumstance simultaneously…
But let’s stick with the realities of duality for a moment:
Yes, existence has a tragic aspect and my heart hurts and goes out to the countless people in profoundly painful and challenging situations; I too have experienced immense pain.
Yes, being born into a middle-class American existence afforded me a lot of opportunities that others on Earth right now do not have!
(That American opportunity-advantage seems to be collapsing more and more all the time, especially post-C-19, but that’s another story.)
I am grateful for this and happy to call myself the luckiest motherfucker alive, as I already said.
Yet I also do not often use the term “privileged” to describe my situation.
Why?
Because “privilege” as a concept/construct is INEXTRICABLY ASSOCIATED with an elaborate ideology that one might call “modern American Leftism,” “social justice ideology,” etc.
In general, I recommend burning down ALL ideologies because no ideology can ever present more than a paltry shadow of Truth — like literally even the best ideology captures 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of Truth.
When held as loosely as possible, most or all ideologies can be useful maps/lenses/mythologies.
Yet to me, modern American Leftism is one of the MOST INSIDIOUS AND DISEMPOWERING ideological mind-viruses presently wreaking havoc on the general population.
It is an ideology utterly steeped in projecting a victim identity onto large swaths of people and pitying those people, thereby making them lower than and disempowering them.
It is an ideology largely held by people who endlessly engage in compensatory virtue signaling, projecting/protecting an image of themselves as “compassionate saviors,” not realizing that this is arising from a place of almost pure arrogance, neediness for recognition, and egoistic self-validation.
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
I am not interested in creating more war-minded dualities of “Us and Them,” “Victim and Perpetrator,” “Inside and Outside,” and so on…
All dualities are disempowering because they are NOT ultimately true.
There are not two things in existence, there is ONE non-thing:
YOU.
YOU are IT….
YOU are the WHOLE non-enchilada.
YOU are the only one here.
YOU are the ALL.
Reality is a Rorschach test that simply presents to you in every moment an EXACT MIRROR REFLECTION of WHAT YOU ARE BEING.
It is ONLY when we each RECLAIM our POWER as the One Infinite Creator of Reality that we will transcend the war-creating dualities that plague us.
By turning people into victims, we only perpetuate our own collective disempowerment.
Am I interested in birthing a New Paradigm Civilization in which ALL BEINGS are honored and enabled to THRIVE and live their Soul-Joy-Truth??
100-MOTHERFUCKING-PERCENT !!!!!!!!
But the way to do that is NOT through dualistic savior-complex-born ideologies that continue to divide the world up along arbitrary lines.
If you haven’t noticed, that’s the game humanity has been playing the past few thousand years and it’s brought us a lot of good ol’ fashioned war and genocide and enslavement and so on.
Only by TRANSCENDING duality and ideology and Recognizing each Being as who they truly are —— THE ONE INFINITELY POWERFUL, FREE, AND GLORIOUS GOD SELF —— can we ACTUALLY birth a New Paradigm on this planet.
Only by Empowering ourselves and others to take 100% MOTHERFUCKING OWNERSHIP FOR ALL OF REALITY AS THE ONE INFINITE CREATOR, will we unlock the non-linear quantum leaps in Creativity, Imagination, and Innovation that we KNOW in our Hearts are possible.
Only by Recognizing that EVERY SINGLE BEING WON THE MOTHERFUCKING LIFE LOTTERY and is being Gifted an Entire Multiversal Playground in Every Moment, and RADIATING from this Energy of GRATITUDE, will we transmute this Realm into the Heaven we all know it can be.
Only by NOT NEEDING anything to Change — by Recognizing the HEAVEN THAT IS ALWAYS ALREADY HERE when one drops all ideology — will we then Bring Forth the Earthly Paradise so many are yearning for.
Move the fuck beyond “privilege” and “white guilt” and “_______ lives matter” and “intersectionality” and “________ rights” ALL THAT SAME OLD VICTIM/OPPRESSOR DUALISTIC BULLSHIT.
BY CHOOSING TO SEE THE WORLD THAT WAY YOU ARE ACTIVELY RECREATING THE EXACT THING YOU BELIEVE YOU’RE FIGHTING / DISMANTLING.
SEE YOURSELF AND EVERY BEING YOU ENCOUNTER AS THE ONE MOTHERFUCKING GOD SELF — AS THE LIVING MIRACLE OF INFINITE MOTHERFUCKING INTELLIGENCE THAT THEY ARE.
And I mean EVERY BEING — not just the ones your supposedly-egalitarian ideology tells you to Love.
LOVE EVERY BEING AS YOUR VERY SELF.
YES, that includes TRUMP and BIDEN and HITLER and GENGHIS KHAN and JEFF DAHMER and MAO and STALIN and ______________.
LOVE AND HONOR EVERY SINGLE BEING AS IF THEY WERE THE LUCKIEST MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE!
Because in Truth… They Are.
They Are the ONE Always-Already-Free INNOCENCE of BEING.
They are Infinite Loving Intelligence.
They are Reality Itself.
And So Are YOU.
You are not your fabricated mental images and stories about a small finite rapidly-expiring helpless monkey on a rock in space.
What You Are is INFINITELY Beyond That.
Your dualistic concept of “privilege” and all your other ideological constructs are compensatory, deluded, and insincere.
You’re full of shit and your dualistic ideology is keeping humanity locked in place rather than calling us to RISE with SOUL-LOVE-POWER into the NEW.
I’m full of shit too — these words are nothing more than the silly hieroglyphs of a naked monkey painting on a cave wall.
When one ceases to see words as having any possibility of accurately expressing reality and instead sees them as poetic-magickal tools to trigger blindspots/shadows to rise into Awareness, the game of language is then approached differently.
So yeah, ALL my words are full of SHIT.
Non-duality is just another BULLSHIT word game.
The only difference between us is that I know and admit I’m full of shit. I don’t need to defend anything and I don’t need anything to change.
BECAUSE I KNOW I AM ALWAYS ALREADY THE LUCKIEST MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE.
It is because I don’t need SHIT from anyone that I can actually BE what the Fuck I AM and RADIATE the NEW.
The ACTUAL NEW, not just the Same-Old-Same-Old dressed up as a holier-than-thou self-righteousness circle-jerk.
Stop stroking your own illusory ego and start LOVING YOURSELF AND THE WHOLE EARTH AND EVERY BEING ON EARTH AS YOUR OWN BODY.
If you actually want a Shift, that is — if your talk of “changing the world” isn’t just hollow self-validating lip service.
Prove me the fuck wrong, bitch!!
Show me what you are.
I love you.
Truly and Honestly: You are Perfect Now, just as you are.
Divinely, Flawlessly Perfect.
And at the same time: You’re full of shit. You are not what you say you are.
Me too.
That’s the Paradox.
Humbling one, ain’t it? : )
So yeah: Fuck “Privilege”
Fuck the elaborate self-validation circle-jerk of Leftism and all other ideological/religious clubs.
That goes for YOU too, Rightists, anti-Leftists, Feminists, Anti-Feminists, SJWs, anti-SJWs, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, vegans, spiritualists, New Agers, rationalists, post-rationalists, effective altruists, solipsists, nihilists, atheists, metamodernists, Game B-ers, integral theorists, non-dualists, scientism-ists, and all other ideologues.
If your “spirituality” or “good guys group” identity separates you IN ANY WAY from the rest of humanity, it is deluded, compensatory, insincere, and full of SHIT.
We’re more Creative than this.
Did you come to this planet simply to validate your own ego, or did you come here to Wake The Fuck Up and thunderstrike this Sphere like a Bolt of Motherfucking Lightning??
If you’re triggered, good. Those feelings literally show you exactly where you are believing false ideas about Reality.
And, spoiler alert: Literally ALL beliefs are untrue — nothing more than little fabricated, compensatory monkey-mind creations.
You have to go beyond belief and TASTE THE MOTHERFUCKING ICE CREAM OF DIRECT NON-CONCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE if you want to grok what I’m speaking about.
Or don’t. Literally totally up to you, and I don’t care either way. It is unwise to listen to me unless you want to challenge your deepest assumptions. Feel free to write me off as a loony tune or a bigot or whatever, unfollow me, and get on with your existence :))
All Good, and All Love from here; I wish you Enjoyment, Blessings, and Freedom.
I wish you the Feeling of Knowing beyond doubt that YOU are the Luckiest Motherfucker Alive.
P.S. Key point: I am NOT denying the experiential reality being pointed at by the concept “privilege.” I am making the more subtle point that the concept of “privilege” and the larger Leftist ideology of which it is part, are insidious/divisive/disempowering in nature and cannot take us where we want in our Hearts to go. Genuine Love and Togetherness can only be discovered through the transcendence of all ideology.
Further Reflections
[The post above, titled Fuck Privilege, was published as a social media post. After a powerful process of discussion and contemplation here are my reflections.]
My essential points in that post still resonate with me. I do feel that Leftist ideology is largely disempowering. I do feel that all ideologies are inaccurate and are gradually transcended on the path to clarity. I do feel that we are all the Totality of Being, and that we are all fortunate beyond measure to experience Life.
Yet upon reflection I can also feel the arrogance, bravado, insensitivity, anger, and ungroundedness in my tone and delivery. I can sense my own suffering in my words. I felt some sadness and embarrassment in relation to the post. I also had a few chuckles about this ridiculous character I’m playing in this life. A humbling experience.
I can see how the protective mechanisms of arrogance, entitlement, anger, bravado, insensitivity, ungroundedness, and an addiction to being seen as special/smart/wise, arose in my life in response to pain/trauma.
I take responsibility for these mechanisms, and I also see and appreciate how these exact aspects have also been essential on my path. Without them, I would not be who I am; I would not have lived the life I’ve lived; I would not have arrived at this precise moment. Like Kanye once sang, “Everything I’m not, made me everything I am.”
In the past year, in many ways, Life has been inviting me to ground, to humble myself, to deepen into service. I resisted the word “service” for a long time and still feel resistance to it. Some voice within me always says, “I am no one’s servant.” More stubbornness from the legendarily well-fortified ego of JB, hahah.
Yet Life is the Master Teacher, and nothing escapes its Omniscient Gaze. It always gives us what we need, and damn, sometimes that’s a bitter medicine to swallow. Life keeps holding up the mirror, urging me to see myself more clearly, and inviting me to come down from the clouds and root my bare feet back in the soil, like I did as a child.
Life is inviting me to be a man here on Earth right now.
I started to cry as I wrote that last sentence—guess it hits home.
To be a man on Earth is in many ways about 10,000x more challenging than playing the aloof eccentric sage meditating in the non-dual heavens.
Life is reminding me that duality is 100% experientially real and painful and heavy and horrifying and challenging, in all its tragicomic beauty.
Life is showing me how my ego twists the wisdom of non-duality into yet another ideology in order to bypass the suffering and complexity of this world.
Life is inviting me to recognize more deeply that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Duality is non-duality, non-duality is duality.
Life is inviting me to embrace the Wholeness that includes both duality and non-duality, and resides beyond both.
Yes, we are all aspects of a Perfection that is entirely at peace with itself. Yes, there is nothing to do or prove or become or accomplish or attain. Yes, All is Well at all times, and no mistake is possible. Yes, we can entirely surrender and trust ourselves to the River.
AND: Yes, there is a concrete world right here in front of us that is asking for our help. Asking for our presence. Asking for our love.
This world is not an unreal illusion, as many Jed McKenna-ites and non-dualists insist. It is not a mirage.
Seeing it as such is often an important stage in recognizing its deeper nature, but as the parable says, you then return to the place where “mountains are once again mountains, and lakes are once again lakes.”
You return to arrive fully in the human experience.
To arrive fully in the human experience, with an Open Heart, ready to serve and be present with whomever is in front of you.
To serve whomever is in front of you as if they were God, as if they were You, as if they were your own child, for now you see that, in truth, they are.
Life invites you to remember that this world is your own Heart.
That this world is calling out to you, requesting your aid.
Requesting your vision, your gifts, your generosity.
Requesting that you come down off your damn non-dual high horse and thrust your hands into the garden soil.
Requesting that you listen to the people, the animals, the plants, the Earth—and skillfully respond.
“Spirituality without service is just mental masturbation,” as Bentinho Massaro once said.
Life is inviting me to embody and ground my highest Truth—to marry dual and non-dual in the alchemical furnace of Love.
Life is inviting me to truly embrace being a human on Earth at this time—and to embrace what is being asked of us, in this moment of Great Transition.
Life is inviting me to Serve.
Love,
Jordan
About Jordan Bates
Jordan Bates is a Lover of God, healer, mentor of leaders, writer, and music maker. The best way to keep up with his work is to join nearly 7,000 people who read his Substack newsletter.
