Decolonizing for Colonizers

How to Quit

Theodore de Bry (1528–1598)

After decades of careful anthropological work excavating the field of Personal Mythology, I’ve realized that the internalized voice I call “Susan” isn’t familial. It didn’t come from my childhood. It’s the worldview of Western civilization, the culture of dominance through violence. This week I saw its truthful archetypal name: “The Colonizer.”

For the longest time, the image I had of the colonizer was a drawing of a man in pumpkin breeches standing on a beach like God’s gift. Since I’m neither a man nor from the 17th century, that meant: Not me.

It all started when I read yet another very good post about decentering men and why that’s so necessary and so difficult for both men and women. In a mercilessly patriarchal culture, without knowing that alternatives exist, it takes some real awareness to even become able to notice how we center men. Especially, I think, if you are a man, because for them, it comes with actual privilege, whereas for white women like me, most of the privilege is imagined - proximate. Without noticing, the culture you were born into simply runs its agenda as if it were you. Operating instructions.

For almost 30 years, I have been practicing self-inquiry, a deeply meditative process of looking into what arises in my mind. Seeing my conditioning. Asking the questions: Who am I? And Who is thinking this? And Who wants? When I ask honestly, the answer always comes, usually as an experience (oh, yay!), often with a big body-emotion attached that must be released.

Once I’ve seen the lie, I’m called to do something that makes me feel like I would rather die. You know: tell the truth that might end my marriage; quit a job, write the book, and so on. It doesn’t let go until you do the thing. The practice seems simple, but it ain’t for the faint of heart.

After I read the post on decentering men, I was called before a small audience at my weekly meditation to promote a retreat we’re doing. I love this community, but even though I’ve gone every week for years, I usually don’t say much or meet many people. For me, it’s not a place of small talk. Mostly, I stay on my own mat.

As I walked to the front, I didn’t plan what I was going to say. There was no thinking inside. I knelt before them and waited. One word became another. When the flow stopped, I returned to my mat.

Then, I saw the thoughts. Stupid. Cringy. Stupid. You should have said... So abstract. You confused them.

I noticed it. That’s the trick. Noticing. After that, there are only two options: think or not-think.

Option 1. Entertaining the Thoughts as True

This keeps me in a closed-loop identity system like a pump circulating dirty water in a fish tank. I ruminate, repeat, obsess. I am the object of those thoughts. Stupid. Cringy. Stupid. I was born stupid and can never be anything but a more sophisticated version of that.

Option 2. Seeing Through the Thought

I don’t have to identify with it simply because it used the pronoun “you.” You said…You’re so… That’s the pronoun it uses when it berates, because even it knows I am not the voice.

And This Time

I saw through it right away, probably because I was in an environment where I’d already dug a deep canyon of silence. Honestly, I couldn’t remember what I said. To do that, I would have to reconstruct the whole thing, which seemed like a lot of work. I’d have to pick up those thoughts, and if I did that, suffering would flood the zone.

So I stayed in joy. The uni-verse inside became a symphony, and far, far away, someone was playing a kazoo. When I looked at her, she evaporated, and my body smiled more deeply into the joy.

The next day, it was not so simple, though. Speaking the language of electrical impulse, it told me a story about my husband, Tom. And I had a reaction, an explosion of violence, self-loathing, and rage. Stories like that aren’t made of words, but of feelings. Images. Reactions. He said something - and BANG. No noticing, no options.

Who exploded?

And here’s what I saw. The choice came much earlier, and that’s when I failed to notice.

I was sending an email to all my subscribers, something I’d failed to do twice before. My friend, Nan Tepper the Substack maven, had given me a step-by-step on Zoom, sharing her screen so I could watch. I even took notes. Emailing for Dummies.

1. Click on the Subscriber Tab. Where’s that? Undeterred, I asked the chatbot, Where’s my subscriber tab? It told me to look in my dashboard, which is where I already was. Where in my dashboard? I asked. By then, the internal voice was already screaming, stupid, but I ignored it. I pressed on, determined to prevail.

The voice wailed. I can’t. I don’t know how. I’m just stupid. I’ll never get this. I can’t do it. I can’t do anything. This always happens.

Grrrrr. I wasn’t getting up until the damn email was sent. And I wasn’t calling Nan again. She’d only think I’m stupid. (Sorry, Nan. I know that’s not you.)

And I did it, finally. I prevailed. Huzzah!

Victory over stupid people who create stupid platforms, and especially the stupid person in this chair who doesn’t get technology like capable people do. Then I walked into the kitchen, pulled out the pan to start dinner, and my husband, Tom, who is on my subscriber list, says, “a.m. or p.m.”

Blink. Blink.

“The time,” he says. “You put Pacific Time and Eastern Time, but you didn’t say a.m. or p.m.”

And to my mind, he’s smug, enjoying his catch and my stupidity. Status-wise, he’s up, and I’m way down. He’s smart, and I’m stupid. He would never have made such a mistake. Never.

And BANG! The nuclear reaction. The heavy pan hits the stove, and I stomp off to the bedroom. Devastated. And I asked this question as a form of self-inquiry. How do I stop a reaction pattern if I don’t even know it’s happening?

And then I saw all the way back to when I was having trouble finding my subscriber list because it was so far down the menu I couldn’t see it without scrolling, and I didn’t see the scrollbar. Then. I had to notice the rising discomfort then. During that mental dialogue about stupidity, Substack’s and mine. I had to stop. But I didn’t want joy then. I wanted to prevail over the system that had dominated me in the past. I wanted to win.

People like to tell me that the “stupid” voice inside is my own self-loathing. But here’s what I saw. That’s the mechanism. I am not that voice, which is why “I” do not have self-loathing. To think I do is a fundamental misidentification of who and what I am. The voice has self-loathing - sure does.

But, I am joy. You may think that’s only a semantic distinction, but it’s the difference between an orchestra and a kazoo.

While it only takes an instant to realize the truth, I live in physical reality, and embodiment is a process. Everything on this earth grows and becomes. I do too.

Thirty years ago, the process began as a draining of the infection caused by trauma. All the decisions the voice made in reaction to trauma caused circumstances. Sick ones. So even though realization is instant, you don’t change your job instantly. There is still a process of healing. After that, though, it’s a simple choice made over and over.

The atmospheric river of my internalized voice didn’t start with my mom and dad as some isolated domestic violence that took place only in our nuclear family - over there. It was created by countless generations of ruthless culture. It’s built on a worship of the Roman Empire, on status, hegemony, achieved through dominance, which deemed it good and profitable to colonize the whole frickin’ globe, causing suffering and death from sea to shining sea.

And what I saw this week was the need to de-center all my thoughts, not just the ones about men. And not just thoughts, but also my emotions and behavior, which begin as unconscious thoughts - reactions. That’s the whole stream of consciousness called “I” or “me,” unless it’s berating. Then, it’s called “you,” with a wagging finger. My pronouns.

This week, I saw the mechanism. That means this isn’t a story about seeing a thought pattern like self-loathing, letting it go, and then being healed. Nope. Not that. Not learning either. Not anymore, since you can’t heal a mechanism. You can only notice when it’s running and when it’s not. That’s huge, though. Noticing is the whole thing.

The purpose of self-inquiry is to become able to see the difference between what I think of as me and who I actually am. And that gulf is as wide as a conquistador’s sea.

This river of Western consciousness, the one that assumes it owned my mother’s womb, and therefore owns the fruit of that womb: me, is a slave owning state. It’s been telling people who they are, where in the hierarchy they fit, and how to behave since long before I was born. And using violence to make it stick.

So, yes, decentering men, let’s have that. But this is really more about decentering the personal tyrant who is a hologram of the collective tyrant. Ruthless. Cruel. Corrupt. Screaming “law and order” while starting unjust war, sacrificing millions to feed its appetite because it thinks people are appetites on two feet. Consumers. The bigger the culture gets, the more peoples they need to eat.

The descendants of colonizers inherit trauma because our culture is so violent. Privilege is traumatic too, because we know it rests on suffering. Even if we flatly refuse to admit it - we know. That’s why the most privileged of this colonizing culture are trying to change history. They know, though. They laugh like they don’t care, but that’s not how it works. A reckoning always comes; one is happening right now.

But we are not that. It’s so simple, really. Metaphysics 101. We are not our thoughts. I heard that as a New Ager in the 80s, but I had no idea. I still thought that mess inside was mine, personal, something I had to control. That didn’t work.

Unlike New Age Susan, you don’t have to buy the marketing, sit lotus-style on a Zafu for decades, or go on a total-darkness retreat. You don’t have to join a twelve-step meeting or go into therapy, though you might be pulled from the inside to do any of those things. You don’t even need a teacher. The Indian saint, Ramana Maharshi, who created self-inquiry, didn’t have one. His question, though, went right to the heart: Who dies?

So if you are searching for enlightenment, you can stop. You simply can’t achieve what you already are. So what are we?

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. Maslow corrected his Hierarchy of Needs (the tip-off is in the title) after spending just six weeks with the Siksika Nation, part of the Blackfeet Confederacy in Canada.

Before meeting them, he thought the highest level of human development was self-actualization. That’s individualism, which runs on dominance and aggression. He simply couldn’t see his own culture, the worldview of the colonizer.

The Siksika people, though, didn’t experience that as reality at all. They started with self-actualization (individualism) as the baseline. Thinking of yourself as a self-centered individual is what children do

During adolescence, people dissolve their individuality as a natural developmental milestone, becoming deeply empathetic and clear-minded. The self is one, like a forest or the ocean, one with all the people and their needs, with nature, with other species, and ultimately with the universe. Imagine how differently they would make decisions.

For those of us in colonizing culture, realizing wholeness is a stripping away - like dying. Our development is arrested in adolescence, a trauma reaction. I don’t think this separation of mind and self we carry is natural at all.

“I think therefore I am?” More like, because I am, I can think. Sit with dying people for a while, and you’ll see that thinking is not a condition of being. Thinking is a doing. It can be a superpower, or as we see all around us, a great evil.

European culture couldn’t colonize without that trauma separation. The violence necessary would be unthinkable. It separates us from the soul-rending consequences of our actions, the kind of horror many soldiers describe after killing for the first time.

This culture largely ignored what Maslow later realized, because the colonizing project depends on our thinking that the highest good we can achieve is becoming the best individual, measured by the accumulation of wealth and power - status in our hierarchy. Privilege. Which we think of as safety. But safety is an illusion. Soon you are a snake eating its own tail who doesn’t notice how miserable you are, giving up your life to work for money. This is the antithesis of community - which is taking loving care of each other and the environment we belong to.

To keep the whole project rolling, we must be isolated. First, into little nuclear family units, separate from all the other family units. Within that, we become isolated individuals who can’t really touch one another. For a social animal, that’s lonely. And loneliness kills.

There is a mitigating fantasy, though, which goes like this: If you’re lucky, you develop a relationship with one other individual who makes their life only about you while you make your life about them. If you’ve tried to live that one, you know what a lie it is.

Am I that violence that wants to hit Tom because it thinks he’s belittling me? No. Am I this bundle of wants? This collection of fears? To what do I refer when I use the pronoun “I?” That’s the essential question: Who are you?

What we think we are is not who we are. Mercifully. That’s not my voice. It’s the voice of culture, of conditioning, and my culture is a ruthless patriarchal colonizer.

To be empty of that voice is such a gift, because the emptiness is full. Of joy. What if, culturally, our joy, our love, our peace, our beauty were making policy decisions? We wouldn’t build detention camps or treat refugees the way we do. We wouldn’t tax the poor to feed the rich. Just wouldn’t. It’s the colonizer who does that, still colonizing the whole frickin’ world through violence. Nothing changes but the date unless we turn away from the conditioned voice inside and make decisions from wholeness rather than separation. It’s a seeing: Who are you?

Many indigenous peoples in North America have prophecies from hundreds of years ago that say colonization will end in the seventh generation if people choose spiritual renewal over materialism. That choice is triggered by environmental collapse. I can’t help but wonder if the choice is made individually first. Then, maybe colonizing culture can finally leave a destructive adolescence and enter adulthood - sober.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment; it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, interacting with you in the comments.

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If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment; it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, interacting with you in the comments.

If you live in the Los Angeles area and would like to see Self-Inquiry in action, I’ll be teaching Saturday, September 12th, from 9 am to 1 pm at Building Futures at 5569 West Washington Blvd. Los Angeles. Here’s the link:

http://tiny.cc/xk18101