Achieving Spiritual Union Through The Passionate Pursuit of Vice

Don’t ask my way, but I’ve had more alcohol in the past week than in the past decade. Not a huge achievement, mind you, but one that probably serves me a lot more than you might suppose. But that’s none of your business.

Statistically speaking, these guys were probably responsible for the lion’s share of actual brain cells lost to this world (NB: turns out that’s not actually true). Although what they made up for in quantity, they certainly lacked in quality, or at least concentration per shot. (They were actually quite tasty, which is how I know.)

Having misspent my youth with the wine and champagne crowd, I never really went all out after shots culture. So whether the paddleboard planche format is unique to this place or a constant of spring breaks everywhere, I have no idea. But it was still marvelous to watch the assembly line of pours and disbursements come down the bar and before the eagerly waiting Russians in my company, barely phased by the apparent decadence before them.

For me, it was nothing that 2 coconuts, a smoothie, a juice, and 2 liters of Pocari Sweat couldn’t neutralize the next morning (and into the afternoon), so besides those alleged brain cells, no harm no foul.

Will I be doing more of this?

The answer is likely yes. There are many reasons that are rather pedestrian and psychological, but the one I find most interesting to grapple with is the local embrace of a deliberate good/evil balance. As I discussed with a Gringo shaman friend of mine, most of the shamans he knows in South America are miraculous healers that do immeasurable good in the world, and spend the rest of their time whoring.

Stan Grof made similar comments about the “latin” shamans of his acquaintance: All authentic miracle workers, who spent their down time hurling hexes at each other. In the end, it was really all about power plays for them, astral pissing contests, balanced out with acts of heroic remediation of the ails of their guests and tribesmen.

And that is sort of the point here, as it is there, and as it is in most places: the balance of good and evil is accepted. My driver even explained to me that dressing statues and even trees in black & white checkered blankets was the locals’ way of “balancing the good and bad spirits.”

This allows for an open acceptance of what we in the west call “vice” in the normal course of life, but it also creates a certain futility or stagnation in life, as one force simply cancels out the other, leaving us balanced but ultimately idle. At least that’s my perception.

In the monotheistic world, we basically have forcefully eschewed this. We live in a brutalist Manichean world, which is incredibly powerful, like a Hoover Dam Sized Firehose being choked off with a mix of circumcision, Catholic shame, and Protestant self-hatred holding fast the kink with all its Abrahamic might. It is an incredibly powerful conceit, as demonstrated by its total global cultural hegemony, but it nonetheless makes most of us crazy in the process.

The entire thrust of life in the west is springboarded and spring loaded, mustering all its energy in what will in the very, very long run be a futile attempt to transcend half of the meaning of life, but which in the meantime harnesses what we would have to acknowledge has been the most powerful force in human history for artistic, intellectual, and technological achievement bar none.

And I am well grounded in that tradition and even see the enormous value in it, despite the many, many, many difficulties it creates for the individual it seeks to liberate and also in the warts and miseries it has a habit of engendering for the rest.

In the end, “the greater good” is a legitimate slice of the human experience (as is family, tradition, and indeed vice), and the west has done more than its fair share of balancing out the stagnation of thousands of years of history history in creating what will likely be a futuristic wonderland which our forbears could never even have dreamed of.

So I am a genuine apologist for the west - in the CS Lewis sense, not in the self-loathing sense. And yet, being here, I feel the pull of the “natural” way of doing things, accepting the dark and indolent side of life right alongside the blessed and productive side of life. And I am reminded of a passage I read in Carl Jung many years ago where he recounts a visit to Africa and the unbelievably strong pull he had there to “go native,” in modern parlance, and live off the pleasures and fruits of the earth, abdicating his role as scientist, healer, and generational thought-leader in the west. In the end, Jung had little equivocation and sternly, Calvinistcally, yanked himself from the clutches of what he called “primitivism” and its undeniable joys, and forced himself back on the steamer for Europe.

And I empathize with old Dr Jung. I have had the impulse to chuck every last bit of western cultivation out of the bungalow window and slip seamlessly into the eternal high tide/low tide of non-western non-duality and the idle pleasures of ambitionless and trajectory-free island life - and more times than I could count or probably should admit.

And like the great sage, I too have resisted, but not with the ferocity that he needed to escape its maw of life’s comforts. Instead, I take the perhaps riskier path of engaging the duality of duality and non duality and leaving the mental drawing room of the west’s purposefulness as I linger in the good/bad seesawness of my current locale - always with an eye on the exit for when I wish to board my own “steamer’ and re-enter the fray.

Vices come, vices go, and we balance them and move on. Heal the sick, bang the whores, drink the coconut, toss back the arak, but overall release the Great Sphincter of Atlas that holds the whole world atop its sexual repression and inexorable striving for redemption, the same redemption we islanders have been living in all along in our Edenic paradise, poor, easily conquered, but undeniably and irreressively happy in our heartfelt embrace of the obviousness of obviousness: that life exists in balance and we can ride the gentle back and forth of the waves for as long as we want, until the Gringo rocketship transports us off the earth altogether or burns itself out trying. Either way, the tide will come in tomorrow, the shamans will whore, and the rapidly acclimating yankees will drink. And all will be well. All will be well. And all manner of things shall be very well. . .