a both/and bitch

on finding peace with life on the bridge between the material and the spiritual.

May 20, 2024

Giving glory and honor to our dearly beloved ancestor, Octavia Estelle Butler. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina offers the first of the verses that will make up the scriptures of EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING on July 20, 2024. You and I, we are nearly there, nearly at the point where Lauren’s testimony of survival and salvation begins. I’m being called to document and share my own testimony, in ways that terrify and sometimes confuse me. But I’m choosing to trust that what I have to share will meet, affirm, and activate those for whom it’s meant. Even if it’s just one person. Even, especially, if it’s just you.   

Below are some of Butler’s most famous words – words that I have read, said, and heard referred to countless times. Perhaps you have, too. Perhaps, like me, you integrate more and more of their meaning with each re-encounter, each reminder. Perhaps these words are meeting you for the first time right now, as you meet them. Either way, I trust that they’re right on time.

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

What if there are things we can “touch,” or that can “touch” us, that aren’t visible, tangible, or material? I’m thinking today about dialectical materialism. This topic challenges me a great deal – not just because the theory is dense, but because of where I find myself in relation to a foundational conclusion drawn by the theory. Dialectical materialism makes a clear distinction between the materialist and the idealist. A materialist believes that our experience of ourselves as humans is decisively shaped by our material pursuits – our work, the things we have to do in order to survive, the things we have to do to have food and shelter and keep our bodies alive and well. Materialism says that matter is matter, regardless of how we perceive it, and matter is the foundation of our existence. An idealist, on the other hand, believes that our experience of ourselves as humans is decisively shaped by our minds and our perception. Idealism says that our thoughts and ideas, as well as the influences of spirits, nature, and unseen forces, serve as the foundation of our existence.

As Dayna Lynn Knuckles would say, I'm a both/and kinda bitch. I become more and more of a both/and kinda bitch as time passes. This both/and bitch energy had me struggling with the notion that, if I'm to be a good leftist, I had to be a materialist, and everything that I created and articulated had to come from this philosophical foundation. If I don’t agree, I must not be a real anticapitalist, I told myself. Let me just shield myself from the potential for being called out as such by rejecting the part of me holding this both/and energy. I’m currently practicing how to express my experience of reality more openly, even with the requisite fear of judgment or ostracization. And my experience of reality is both material and spiritual. I, like you, am navigating the survival of my physical body in a material world structured by late-stage capitalism. I’m also someone who is deeply attuned to the spirit realm, in regular contact with and shaped by encounters with unseen, intangible energies. I’m coming to understand this attunement through the lens of extrasensory perception. I clearly hear messages from my ancestors, spirit guides, and Source/Spirit/God (clairaudience). I clearly sense and experience unseen energies in my physical body (clairsentience). I clearly feel the emotions of others, whether or not they’re aware of them (clairempathy). And I clearly know things with no external or logical explanation (claircognizance). These modes of perception have been with me my whole life, but now I’m releasing more of the trauma and limiting beliefs about myself that blocked me from attuning to and trusting them. Writing these words and knowing that others will read them feels frightening. I feel most frightened by the prospect of being regarded as delusional, of not having my articulation of my reality believed. I’ve had the experience in recent years of coming out as queer, coming out as non-monogamous, and coming out as neurodivergent. Coming out as someone whose human experience is shaped in large part by extrasensory modes of perception feels the scariest of all, particularly as someone who studies and struggles on the radical left.  

Can you and I be good anticapitalists without holding a materialist perspective as right and an idealist perspective as wrong? I speak to my ancestors, and they speak back to me. I feel energy. I feel Spirit. I know that I don't have material evidence to show people to say, here is something that is also shaping me. I understand how, from a materialist perspective, the forces of production and the things that we do to keep our bodies alive shape our existence. I experience that as true. I also experience as true that there are forces that we don't see, that are not tangible, that are also shaping us. How best do we show up for this work as people whose experience of our own existence lies between materialism and idealism?

As I hold these questions, Octavia reminds me that God is Change. She reminds me that we are Earthlife equipped to shape God through how we shape Change. Later in her journey, Lauren elaborates further on this process in another verse:

To shape God,

Shape Self.

If God is Change, and we shape God by shaping ourselves, then we are God shaping itself on Earth through how we experience and create Change. All of us are God in material form. On a soul level, we are all One. None of us are separate from God. We are all God being and expressing itself on Earth. God is not an arbitrary being choosing willy-nilly what happens to one human or another. We can shape ourselves in the image of the truth of who we are, which is God. We can return back to knowing ourselves as that Oneness. This is why I see God in people organizing and engaging in direct action, mutual aid, and political education to shape a world in which capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism no longer exist. Just as I see God in people opening their hearts to love, communing with ancestral spirits, and receiving revelations through intuitive ways of knowing.

Lauren received the revelation that the universe exists to shape God, as God exists to shape the universe. She couldn’t resolve this circular logic because she, too, came to know herself as a both/and kinda bitch. She knew that all parts of the universe are Godseed. But we?

We are Earthseed

The life that perceives itself

Changing.

Everything in the Universe is God, and God is in everything in the Universe. Including us. But we can actually come to perceive ourselves as God. This understanding is what allows me to hold a both/and perspective as it relates to the materialist/idealist philosophical contradiction. I can hold this perspective and show up for my work in the world, my shaping of God by shaping Change, by shaping myself. I’m arriving into a peace and acceptance with where I sit in the in between, thanks to Octavia's reminder.

God is not an idea, not a mysterious force beyond our control.

God is us.

We are God.

We are human and divine, and our consciousness is shaped by and as both. We are each a specific fractal of Source that was meant to be embodied in the material in order to feel things, experience things, learn things, and create things that contribute to our collective Source experience of itself as Love. I know that every action I take in the service of the rebirth, regeneration, rebuilding, and renewal of the truth of who I am is both shaped by and shaping Source. We are here to integrate the unique fractal of Source that we are into the material world. And this work includes engaging with all of our capacities for knowing, both sensory and extrasensory.

Lauren says that the destiny of Earthseed is “to take root among the stars.” I don’t necessarily believe that we are to leave Earth and populate other parts of the Universe. I’m coming to believe that perhaps we are meant to root the energy of the stars into this Earth. To bring the frequency of Heaven to Earth. And we do that through our actions. We do that through how we treat ourselves, and how we treat each other. We do that by how we choose to shift and change from a place of love for each other. The underlying assumption in the definitions that many use to describe idealism is that a belief in God or the Spirit realm as a shaper of our reality is a belief in an idea outside of ourselves. This is what a lot of us have been taught about God. My experience of God is feeling myself as a drop that, along with other drops, forms a wave that, along with other waves, forms the ocean. It’s remembering myself as that entire ocean, as I simultaneously experience myself as that drop.

If we think about folks like Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner, we might remember that they described being in direct dialogue with God in ways that shaped their reality. They heard and felt God. From there, they took inspired action to change their material existence. Just as Vodou in Haiti sparked and fueled a very material revolution. Just as the church was an organizing home base for the very material Civil Rights Movement. Many of our fiercest revolutionaries also had an equally fierce and robust spiritual life, including regular contact with the unseen. Must we choose to say that it was either the material or the spiritual that decisively defined and shaped them?

Contemporary historians have looked back at Tubman and Turner through the lens of disability, or of psychiatric disorder. I view myself through these lenses, too – autism, CPTSD, depression, generalized anxiety disorder. I recognize that my experience of the material world is different from the “norm” for these reasons. As I came to understand myself as autistic, my inability to tolerate injustice came into sharper focus. Harm and hierarchy and oppression are so intolerable to me that my body physically can't withstand it. A materialist might say, this is because you're neurodivergent, and because of this your brain and nervous system respond in outsized ways to a lot of things, including injustice. Your autism is a material reality of how your brain and nervous system work, and that material reality can be explained through tangible data that scientists can collect and study and generate theories about to explain why you are this way. An idealist might say, this is because you’re someone who remembers our Oneness. You’re someone who knows all of us to be vessels of God expressing itself on Earth. Therefore, it’s intolerable for you to see humans treating each other as though we are anything other than parts of the same whole. It’s intolerable for you to see humans regarding each other with anything less than the love that we all are at our core, as Source. Both the hypothetical materialist and idealist explanations are true for me, true to my experience of my own reality. I know that the oppression, coercion, hierarchy, and violence of this system inflame and eat away at my physical vessel. My spirit within that vessel cannot understand how it’s possible that we have forgotten our Oneness. But I'm here to be a part of the collective that returns us back to who we are.

This is my ancestral spirituality. This is me coming back home to myself. Even before I had the language to articulate this, my heart and soul remembered. Many pre-colonial indigenous cultures regarded those of us that we would today call neurodivergent, and/or that we would today diagnose with a psychiatric disorder, as seers, prophets, oracles, diviners, healers – vessels that were attuned in a particular way to the spirit realm, who experienced reality as being not just the material or the spiritual, but all of it at the same time. As a bridge between Heaven and Earth. Under a disabling structure like capitalism, my autism and psychiatric disorders are disabilities. In a different context, those of us who are neurodivergent and mentally ill could perhaps be recognized and cared for as beings who function as that bridge, rather than being forced to conform to a material reality in which our both/and embodiment and processing become liabilities.

Lauren had extrasensory perception, too. She had a “fictional” syndrome called hyperempathy, feeling in her own body what others felt in theirs. I put that word in quotation marks because…well…some of us know a little bit about what it’s like to live this way. To feel what others feel. Lauren was formed that way in her mother’s womb, because of what her mother experienced. And Lauren’s hyperempathy made navigating her material reality quite difficult and dangerous. It was regarded as a disability. It also made her a bridge. Her depth of extrasensory experiencing and processing supported her ability to receive the revelation of Earthseed, and to allow what she received to light the way for herself and others. Lauren’s hyperempathy was how she experienced our Oneness.

Religion has told many of us that God simply happens to us. God shapes us, but we don't have any power to shape God. Sounds a lot like capitalism, right? We must do our best to appease and obey God (the boss), and if we do, God will dole out blessings (wages) to us. If we don't, God will punish us (fire us and leave us without the means to survive). It's not surprising that this understanding of God is what we were fed. We’re in a moment now where more and more of us are understanding and spreading the good news that we can shape God as Change. More and more and more of us are saying, enough. We recognize that the material reality shaped by capitalism always had an expiration date, and that we are nearing that date at a rapid pace. We recognize that we are engaged in a struggle. We recognize that there are people and entities at the top of this inversion, this upside-down reality, who believe they have the natural right to exploit and destroy life for profit. We recognize that we get to reject this fallacy and choose interdependence, care, reciprocity, and love over exploitation, hierarchy, coercion, and destruction. We get to choose our Oneness. And we can choose through our internal, unseen, energetic experience as much as we do through our visible, tangible actions in the material world. They are, of course, shaping each other.

Octavia once described the genre of science fiction as “a handful of Earth, and a handful of Sky” (also the title of an excellent book by Lynell George about Octavia’s process of shaping herself). Earth and Sky. We are both/and, shaping ourselves and our reality in the space between. And I’m here on the bridge with you.

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