Thomas Hubl: I’m sitting here with my friend, Bayo, Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo, first of all, warm welcome to our course. I was just going to say, we had already multiple conversations and every time I learn something, every time, I love your refreshing perspectives. There’s always some edge to your kind of exploration and I love it very much. It’s organic, it’s unfolding, it’s challenging, and it’s beautiful. So thank you for being who you are in the world and the voice that you bring. I appreciate you very much.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, brother.
Thomas: So today, I would love us to explore a bit because there’s modern psychology and modern psychology has a—Or maybe in all kinds of methodologies of inner work and transformational work. Put a strong emphasis on the individual. In a hyper individualized world, there’s a lot that individual has to take, has to perform, has to—And often our healing journey also becomes, like our trauma integration or psychotherapy journey, becomes also like a personal success story.
I somehow feel that there’s too much weight on the individual and there is too little inclusion sometimes. Not always, but sometimes on the context and the wider ecosystem or collective context we are part of. And so I would love to explore a little bit with how you look at what I just said, and then also bringing and connecting this to a deeper, spiritual bowing context, exploration. And what’s the resourcing? What’s the power that we gain maybe for our healing journey and for our collective healing journey through the spiritual dimension? Anything that comes to mind, let’s start there.
Bayo: Thank you, brother. You’re right in noticing that it seems modern individuation is losing its capacity for buoyancy, right? We’re speaking about practices that are ecological, that are archetypal, that are archeological. Individuals don’t just emerge in the world. The world is relational and processual, and co-emergent, and open-ended, and experimental and tentative. And so there is a sense in which individuation, as Simondon would put it, is an ongoingness. We’re not individuals, we’re individuations. So modernity kind of closes the door on many things. It cuts out so many things in order to preserve the myth and the story of the individual as a dissociated, independent sovereign thing as a self that has a divine interior and a mute exterior about him.
I mean, it’s been useful to create rocket ships and to create Elon Musks, but at this time I think we’re kind of at an edge where that story is difficult to maintain. Separation is very difficult to sustain as a cultural myth at this time and that brings us to how even our paradigms of healing have to change shape, have to take on new shape because healing over time has been… Popular discourses around healing centralized the individual. Again, it’s the individual that sits in the couch just to put it uniquely.
It’s the individual that lies in the Freudian couch. It’s the individual that presents herself before the therapist in the clinical setting. It’s the individual that needs to be fixed in those paradigms that think about fixings. But now we’re not so sure where the individual is anymore. Thomas is not the thing seated before me, distinct from his room. Thomas is the room, right? Thomas is the chair. Thomas is intergenerational longings. Thomas is microbial gestures. Thomas is furniture and the intensity and density and the thresholds of a force field.
How do you treat a force field? How do you medicate a force field? How do you think about the healing of a force field? So there’s a lot of tension in the spaces right now, especially introduced by post-humanist, animist, feminist, new materialist and Indigenous discourses that are inviting a different iteration of healing that may not look like healing as we understand it. This is why Deleuze and Guatarri could formulate schizoanalysis, right? But there is a sense in which getting away from the couch is the thing to do. Not staying in the couch, but getting away from the couch.
So I do think that we are in something of a spiritual crisis, and it might be helpful to come to a definition of terms however hesitant I am to stabilize myself behind definitions. But when I think about the spiritual, I am immediately at once in touch with the heritage of my Christian background. I no longer identify as Christian, but I grew up in a Christian world and the spiritual was the other part of the material.
It was the material realm and the spiritual realm. It was a dichotomy of some kind, a binary. It’s hard for me to think about the world in that way right now. But there is the other story faintly perceived in the Yoruba Indigenous accounts of spirituality, which might suggest to us that the spiritual is how the material travels.
So it’s not the material versus the spiritual, it’s that materiality is mysterious in itself. It’s not the materiality of determinism. It’s not the materiality of John Locke or Descartes. It vibrates at the speed of mystery. Spirituality is how materiality travels. But let’s take the conversation from there. I’ll just offer that to our compost heap of our conversation.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s amazing. I would love to hear more also from you because what I hear it implies the material world is moving. So you’re speaking a lot about the movement when you say it travels. So maybe let’s speak a little bit about movement. You said something before that I really loved is I cannot—I’m paraphrasing now, but you said something, “I am hesitant to stabilize myself behind/through terms.” That’s a lovely way to say. I love it. But then also it seems like there’s an impact on some kind of movement. When I listen to you, I get a deep sense of movement.
Maybe you can speak a little bit to the dimension of movement because it seems like spirituality is somehow connected to some sort of movement when I listen. And maybe you can speak a bit deeper to that.
Bayo: I mean, it’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and locating a piece of matter in space time that the moment you try to locate it, you lose a sense of other kinds of measurements. If you can determine its speed, then you lose a sense of location. If you determine its location, then you don’t know how fast it’s traveling. There’s a sense of complementarity that is at work here, but the gist is that everything moves and the world is movement. Even the individual which is often stabilized as uniquely and exclusively independent is a concatenation of movements, viral, microbial, ancestral.
We’re not put together as much as we are a coming together and falling apart simultaneously. So the modern tries to locate us. Its gist. Its most overriding imperative is to locate the self in a final way. And this leads to troubling realities like racialization and colonization, and extractivism and neoliberalism.
It leads to these very troubling kinds of dimensions, even pathologization, that this is a proper subject and this is an improper subject. This person is autistic, therefore inadequate, and this person is neurotypical, therefore a proper person. Lacan thought about language and identity in very, very stabilizing ways that in order to think, you need language. And if you don’t have language, then you’re an improper self, which of course totally banished the intelligence of autistic children and autistic people at the time that he was speaking. Of course, that gave rise to the work of Deleni, but that’s a different point.
So it seems here, brother, that I cannot but think in terms of movement. The world is chaos, the world is difference, and this difference precedes identity or language. We’re in constant negotiation with the world around us and I’m not even talking about in linguistic terms, I’m talking about the ways our skins are navigating and conducting experiments at different dimensions with the world around us.
We are even seated in some kind of conversation with evolutionary pathways and paradigms. Even just to have a drink of water is to ignite pathways across space-time, across species, across multi-dimensions of how drinking a cup of water is the creation and the demise of worlds. It’s the death and the birth of worlds simultaneously. So this is quite overwhelming for if you are a clerk in an office space in a cubicle and your work was to put everything in a file. You would be overwhelmed if things were spilling constantly, right?
Spillage is the, I think in my understanding of things, a very, very terrible crisis, a scandal to the modern. But that’s what seems to be happening every time. The psyche is not still. The psyche is not within. The psyche is ecological and is moving. And there’s no way to come to terms with the world without noticing how it moves, how it shifts. And that’s how I think about the spiritual. I don’t think about the spiritual as a different realm that interrupts the material over time or sometimes.
That feels very, very mechanistic and modern. The Yoruba people did not have that kind of conception, which is very interesting to me. They thought about spirits as living in the material realm because spirits are only finer kinds of bodies. So the spiritual is still the mysterious material. It’s clear materiality. It’s how the world refuses to be still.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Again, I want to say, I said this is the last time that I love the flow of your words, your eloquence, how you put words into a movement. That’s already a sign when I listen to you, it induces in me like a movement. It induces in me rhythm. And I am joining a movement that you form through your words. It’s like joining like when two rivers flow together and they create water patterns. So that’s how I feel when I listen to you and I really enjoy this. It’s kind of playing in my neurons as music. So it’s lovely.
First of all, I so much resonate with many things that you just said. I think also that it’s the beauty in the movement and the beauty in being more and more able to participate in the movement that’s unfolding versus trying to control that movement from the past.
Bayo: Yes.
Thomas: To be able to open up to the movement that’s happening and immerse oneself in it and be able to be in this. I love what you said about the, we are constantly being… You said it differently, but being updated and in a deep exchange with the movement that’s happening, that’s different from a preformed cup that is kind of your life. And that’s also when I speak about that we need to open the context, this moment that we are in, we cannot anymore stay with methodologies that are really addressing our personal and childhood development. It’s much bigger than that. There is an ancestral dimension and there is a collective dimension, and they’re all interplaying. They’re not separate.
Today we look at this and then we look at that. I’m wondering if you want to speak a bit more about, I mean, I’m also very interested to learn from you about some of the principles of African spirituality and the depth of the spirit speaking in that voice or that form. I don’t know if that’s something you want to go into, but I would love to hear more. You started already to share a few principles before, but to speak a little bit more about how healing is being viewed, how disease is being viewed like what you said before, pathologizing or non-pathologizing views of life and how life is emerging all the time. So if you can speak a little bit from that voice or your connection to the depth of the spirituality.
Bayo: Well, maybe the first thing I’ll say is that there are as many African mythologies and systems around these matters of concern as there are Africans or as there are African cultures. So it would be impossible to speak about, of course, all of them since there are many Africans within Africa. I do feel compelled to say a few things about some of those that I’ve been exposed to like the Igbo cosmologies of harmony restoration, which was beautifully put together by one of my supervisors, a professor while I was doing a PhD. Professor Peter Ebigbo.
He convened the idea of harmony restoration reading into Igbo cosmology, the idea of disharmony being a discontinuity or rupture that separates us from the spiritual. And the spiritual of course is a deeper intensity of the everyday. I’m not going to break down the entire system here, but of course there is a sense in which harmony is designated as a quadrant or something that looks like a four angled shape, which is a motif that appears throughout Igbo culture, right?
In fact, before the British missionaries came, the Igbos had a four-day week, a four-day week. Everything stands properly on fours in that conceptualization. Fours is stable. So when it becomes three or when it becomes a binary, when it becomes one, it means many things at many different levels. Some of the ways that this is noticed is that you are cut off from community.
If there ever comes a time where you are cut off from your people, you’re cut off from your name, you’re cut off from sharing a kola nut in the morning, you’re cut off from the sweltering heat of greeting each other or sharing a meal, then you become sick. Notice that sickness has nothing to do with the person itself, but has everything to do with paradigms and territories and force fields so that the work then is how do we restore you to the community?
How do we restore you to eating well? How do we restore you to having communion with the plants around you? How do we restore you to praying to your chi, which is your God or to your ancestor? How do we restore you to giving sacrifice as well? So this is a very, very communal way of holding space for people that wasn’t about fixing you. It’s not about your issue, it’s about what it is doing to the village.
The village is the individual, not the isolated self. That brings me to the Yoruba people too. I studied with healers and one of the things that I noticed, Yoruba healers, Babalú-Ayes, one of the things that I would notice is how they displaced the individual in the act of what you might call in conventional therapeutic settings, the intake interview, getting a sense of the client, recording the data. So tell me about yourself and all those things, and mm-hmms and ahas that we’re trained to do, right?
Aha, mm-hmm. You know the drill. And so they didn’t practice the head nodding, distancing, elitism that I was trained in as a psychotherapist. They were less bothered about me as they were about the people around me as they were about the invisible. It’s as if their posture was like, who are the others here? Who are the other people here? Who’s your auntie? Who’s your uncle? Where do you actually come from? Did your village eat well today? It’s more about also that sense that we are lineages.
The self or the subject, or the subjectivity is not the isolated highway, it’s a milieu. It’s an entire zeitgeist that is called into the space. Right? And so the idea wasn’t to try to get to fix you. And that was even more emphasized when they recommended interventions. They would say something as crazy as… At least to me, who was interviewing them and speaking with them and listening to them, they would say something like, “How about you bring a goat and we kill that goat together? And you drop the blood of the goat in this river,” or something like that. And you would say, how does that have anything to do with my feeling depressed?
How does that have anything to do with? And yet, to them, the world wasn’t just this mechanistic cause and effect machine, it was something more vibrant than cause and effect, it was a spilling together where the minute or the remotest artifact of being is in solidarity, a strange sensuous kind of solidarity with the things that you’re presenting with in a healing context. So already that vocation of the public interrupts the interiority of the private.
The spirituality from African cosmologies, the ones that I, at least I’ve spoken to, are very, they gesture towards the public. They gesture towards the trans public. They don’t situate the individual as well as the… as western paradigms do.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s again like music. And I love, and most probably also because we—And for a long time we have been fixated in a way as society so much on individual development, it feels like a breath of fresh air to open that up and feel, “Oh, wow, there is a whole world and context that’s so important for wellbeing.” And wellbeing is not in a locus, it’s not in a location. It’s kind of living as the relationships that are flowing through us. And to me, this feels like when I listen to you, it generates me the feeling of oxygen. It generates a feeling of like, “Ah, I can breathe again and I can exhale into the movement that is happening anyway that I’m swimming in.” And that feels very good to me.
I feel like… Because I very much feel that… And I’m saying this now in my words, and then you see how that lands with you, but through that complex trauma dissociation in our global world, that so much information is actually more frozen, more held, more structured, that sense of that my liver communicates with that part of a continent, that there is an interdependent flow and the data flow around the whole world, that feels to me so liberating, so fresh, so energizing.
And the more we think in these small boxes of eyes, then it feels like the oxygen is missing in the room. And so when I listened to you, I had again that feeling like, “Ah, this feels so healthy.” I doesn’t negate individuation, not at all, but it opens, so that’s beautiful.
Bayo: Yes. I mean, the story of psychology and its disciplinarity has always been tied with politics. It has never been a thing apart. Even the ways that we think about trauma, I think it’s impossible, or I don’t want to say impossible because many people do it, but it’s difficult, at least for me, who is tied to a Whiteheadian, Alfred North Whiteheadian, process/reality, the way the world spills into itself. It’s difficult for me to think about, say trauma without thinking about railways and the rise of industrialization and the demise of the welfare state, and who has rights to compensation, who has right to be seen as a victim, therefore racialization.
It’s difficult for me to think about trauma as a clinical reality without noticing that it is also part of a moral architecture that is troublingly allied with racial dynamics. I don’t need to surface the story though it’s interesting when I tell the story, speaking with my students about Charles Dickens and how a train ride killed him in effect one year after the accident. And during that time there was a scramble. It was like the big scramble for Africa. There was a scramble for how do we understand this phenomenon?
And people like JJ, is it Erickson? Would formulate what is called the railway spine. And the railway spine was the inaugural idea that initiated the story of trauma as this psychosomatic disturbance. But even with that framing, there was always a sense of who gets to become a proper subject. How do we parse between proper and improper? Because the moment you start to think about disruption as something that comes from outside, you have already drawn the line of where the inside is. Right?
I remember speaking with [_inaudible_] and they were flabbergasted. They were shocked that I would think about voices in one’s head as pathology. Which is very strange because that’s how I grew up. That’s how most of us, I dare say, grew up. Voices in the head, that’s auditory hallucinations. No, that’s a spiritual crisis. What if that’s your grandmother? What if that’s an ancestor trying to speak with you? The idea that our bodies are—Psychology is not a study of behavior or the study of human beings as it is the manufacturing of subjectivity.
That means it leaves something out in its ingredients to put together a self that is proper. It always leaves something out. What it has discarded is very interesting to me.
Thomas: Yeah. I completely agree with that individual psychology has to leave something out. That’s why I think—
Bayo: It has to.
Thomas: Yeah, it has to. I mean, because it’s already in the definition and that many other forces are not being included in experience.
Bayo: Yes.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. And so when we speak a bit about that spiritual depth, you said it beautifully something that’s deeper than the everyday and when we speak about that movement. So how is spirituality, in your understanding, important, a resource in our everyday life, but also in our healing journey? Coming back to before, when the individual has its own success story in healing itself, then it becomes like running a marathon. But I feel that just opening the context often is speeding up the healing process so much, but that often entails also, or includes, a much deeper connection to the deeper than the everyday.
For many people that’s naturally opening up in that process when we open up that box of the individuals. So maybe you can speak a bit to your experience in your healing work. And also how you speak to a very ingrained, and it’s changing a bit now, but a very ingrained scientific separation from that context.
It sounds like there are two—There’s some are spirituality, there’s scientific objectivity, scientific experiment, shared insight, and like. Why don’t you speak a bit to that.
Bayo: Let me speak to that a bit and why I feel—Sometimes we conflate spirituality for the supernatural and I feel the supernatural is possibly the most unfortunate word in the history of words. It’s very unfortunate. I’ve told a story a long time ago of Halley’s Comet, and I think I read this when I was a teenager. I think it’s Halley’s Comet and who’s the guy? Halley? I know his name is Halley, but I forget his first name. But this was invoked when he started to speak.
There was a time when comets were interpreted as angels in flight in Europe, in Christian Europe like, “Oh, that’s an angel. That’s an angel delivering the word of the Lord.” It was easier to think of comets that way. And then these dastardly astronomers started to try to interpret the stars, the heavens, and one in question gave a date for when the comet would return because he had studied the cycles and he said, “On this day, in this year, a comet will come.”
I think at this time, based upon this reading I had many years ago, it became this feverish attempt. It became a debate between faith and science or the idea of the supernatural or a world where nature needs no God, which is a false dichotomy, but that’s where I’m heading to. So Halley didn’t live to see his comet return. But when it returned, it kind of broke something. Right? Because if it can be predicted, then it’s not an angel in flight, then there’s no need for God. Then what do we do about the supernatural? Then the church is in crisis because in their own schema, a world that we can speak with and communicate with is not a world where God is required, it’s just a machine.
I think it’s a false dichotomy. It’s a broken binary here. The supernatural is unfortunate because it offers us only two options. A world that is intensely mechanistic and therefore amenable to scientific description and exploration and control, and prediction or the world where anything goes because God decides it. There are no laws per se because he can just tinker with stuff and get things done the way he wants.
Both do injustice to an animist world that is open-ended, that doesn’t require a Gandalf to make it happen. And a world that is in itself spiritual because it is not finished. The unfinishedness of the world is where the spiritual lies for me. Where was I going with this, brother? Your question was about—I just fell into Halley.
Thomas: Dichotomy. The binary between science and spirit.
Bayo: Yes. But before that you wanted me to speak to something and I was really excited to speak about it and I just trailed off. I get lost very easily in these songs. You wanted me to speak to something? Was it just the dichotomy, the binary?
Thomas: Yeah, the binary. Right. And how we are living in a world that is defined a little bit by this binary because the language of the world became science and then it seems like a twoness with the whole spiritual dimension and how you speak to that. That was, yeah, how.
Bayo: So in that sense, the spiritual for me is the integrity and the fidelity of the relationships we have with a world that is unfinished. It’s not a quality of distance. This is my Christocentric heritage, the quality of a distant God who needs to be with us. No, it’s the apophatic quality of matter. That is if you could put matter under a microscope and finally describe it, then maybe there’s no need for the spiritual. But that even the microscope is a measuring. Every measurement is a cutting device. Every measurement we make cuts out something.
We don’t see the world as it is. Our bodies, and maybe this is really where I wanted to go with this, that our bodies are so large and complex, and territorial. And this is what the modern misses out on. Like I said earlier, it wants to stabilize us within a sentence, within the grammar of presence, a metaphysics of presence. So it wants to put a box around and say, “This is what it means to be Thomas. And this is what it means to be Ben or Sheri.” But our bodies are doing things at other levels. And let me just speak to that a little bit, brother.
I don’t know if you read this report that on Mount Fuji or Fiji in Japan… Not Fuji, Fiji, Mount Fiji. Is that in Japan? I think that’s in Japan. Well, it’s considered a pristine mountain where the clouds hang low and it’s come up in images and this beautiful… Sorry, my jet lag brain is working up. They found microplastics in those clouds and in caves that have been shut out from public participation for decades. They found microplastics as well. They shut it out. They closed the doors. No human interference and yet we are still there.
To me, that is the spirituality of the nuclear human. Even when we don’t go there, our bodies are participating in some dimension with turtles, with mountains, with hidden caves. We are spread out that way. Now, many might say, “What does microplastics got to do with depression?” I’m trying to say that our bodies are not this. This is not the body. Our bodies are a lot more molecular and micro looking than what appears. So spirituality is the invisibility of what appears.
It is how we are in touch with worlds and are in conversation with dimensions that don’t show up in our healing paradigms or even how we think about justice. So it’s always going to be inadequate if you send someone out with a clean bill of health back into a world that co-produces the very conditions that gave birth to the crisis. If you say, “Oh, you are good now because you’ve done the work.” But you put them back into a socio materiality that is like… What’s that wheel? Where the rat goes on? [_moves hands in a spinning motion_]
It’s like a wheel that co-produces and churns and churns the same kind of problematic situations. Then we are going to keep coming back. You’re going to keep the psychotherapeutic context is going to be unfortunately the manufacturer of clients.
Thomas: Yeah. I love this like what you said about the body also that the view that we currently hold about the body and the nervous system, that the nervous system is this anatomic structure.
Bayo: [_hand gesture of object in front of him_]
Thomas: That’s here and that’s your property and the only bios living in there and that’s the close versus, oh, that nervous system is a biocomputer. We are all the living record of humanity’s history. Again, I feel when we speak the whole time, I have this feeling of expansion. I have this feeling of breathing and oxygen and I have this sense of more freedom so that when I listen to the open context, not just the focus here, the open context. It feels to me so much richer, so much more open. At least that’s coming up for me when I listen then my preformed set of how the world might be actually needs to leave.
I’m much more called into an ongoing relational presence like an ongoing relating with what is because that’s the source of insight. But that’s a very different thing that is being taught in many places because the preformed idea about life is much more prevalent than being in the fluidity of a relational data transfer all the time.
Bayo: Yes.
Thomas: So for me, this feels very fluid. I get a sense of fluidity when we talk.
Bayo: That is good to hear, brother. The spaciousness is what’s missing in our paradigms of justice and of healing. Today, we’re kind of stuck and we’re becoming a lot more brittle in the ways that we shape even ideas of safety for instance. It’s becoming increasingly conformist and proto-fascist. So if you don’t adhere to preset, pre-designated notions of identity, then there’s something wrong with you. That creates the anxiety of categoricity and that’s what whiteness does well.
White modernity, which is, again, as I’ve described to you brother in previous conversations, is not white people. That’s whiteness doing its reductionism again. Whiteness is not white people, but it has been deployed as a speculative term in Black scholarship to think about the ways that the world is increasingly uniform in creating dissociation. I think that that cutting away of our tentacular relations with ancestry and ancestry not as a—When people hear ancestry, they often—Well, this is not accusatory and this is not a monolith of an idea, but it seems people think we connect, we take the step to connect to ancestry and there’s some truth to that.
But whether you take the step or not, you’re ancestral is the point. It’s not a decision like let me connect with… It’s not a toolkit like I’m going to speak to an ancestor today. It’s that you are the troubling continuity and discontinuity of matters that were never finished, of questions that were never fully articulated, of answers that will never fully land.
So the idea of let’s get ourselves together where we can be fully whole and complete is already disjunctive. No, that’s not the word I want to say is already some kind of a rigid rupturing away that reinforces the modernity that I speak about.
Thomas: And it also, the notion, and I think that shows up in spirituality very often it seems like there is an aim. And once I get there, everything will be good.
Bayo: Yes. It’s a romanticization, Disney. Disney.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. And I think that’s very important. It’s also what you just mentioned it yourself that the unwillingness to be in the fragility of a life that is scary at times cannot be fixed with an ultimate end of the story. But that’s what we often perpetuate this notion in our society. But if we can see more that the end of a perfect ending is a reflection of a lot of unsafe and a lot of scared parts of us, then I think then we become much more vulnerable in the relationship here because then it needs to be more solved here than there.The postponing of the solution doesn’t work. So then it’s about us and not about where we are going to land. I think that’s very powerful. I very much agree with it.
Bayo: It lends itself to the conceptualization of the spiritual bypass. And we can speak about that. How about we do that?
Thomas: Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s do that. So spiritual bypass, maybe you give it a shot.
Bayo: I mean, what word comes to mind? The song comes to mind is it’s one about, I’m just passing through this world. I forget the Christian song. We sang it about this world we’re just passing through. We don’t belong here. We belong elsewhere. It’s almost Elon Muskian in his aspirations that if we go to Mars, then the human as a colonial territory won’t follow us. Machine guns won’t follow us. We will arrive there and start on a clean slate. The clean slate is the problematic thing here.
We start at the beginning or the end or we end at the end, but we hardly ever live in the middle of things. The middle is noxious and disturbing. And I think the idea of the… You’ve already beautifully spoken to it, brother, without naming it that way, the idea of a bypass is… I think it’s helpful to some degree in noticing the reductionism at work.
We populate the spiritual with utopian sentiments. And so if only we can get there, then all things will be well. We’re just passing through. I’m just passing through. If only we arrived there. Which is not to say the… I mean there’s another element here that I don’t want to go deep into, but the nihilism of Blackness is subtly expressed in the idea of hereafter or an afterlife. And I recognize that as well.
But there is also the sense in which people try to reduce, try to get aside the pain and the suffering and the immediacy of trouble by creating metaphysical safety. And with metaphysical safety, I can get a side or I can bypass as one would say. The other dimension to this brother is that bypassing is becoming a universal accusation and it’s worrisome. It’s that every attempt to outthink or rethink or reframe the linearities and the practices that we’re used to is immediately amenable for that accusation.
It’s like, “Oh, you’re doing spiritual bypassing. You’re bypassing.” But sometimes it’s not bypassing, it’s sidestepping the logic. It’s sidestepping the logic of containment. For instance, calling healing into question and noticing the practices of healing, which are not pure or which are not without trouble, but are entangled with ecological practices that are linked and networked with suffering is not bypassing. And noticing that sometimes the way we respond to the crisis is the crisis is not by bypassing. It’s sidestepping the logic that we’re used to.
So there is a sense in which we are gifted with a conceptualization that named something and then we take that name and we paint the town red with it. Trauma wasn’t such a big word decades ago. It’s now the biggest word. Everyone is traumatized these days. And that is troubling to me.
Thomas: Yeah, I love it. I think you said something very interesting. You said how bypassing, the word bypassing, becomes the bypassing by putting it in a disrelated way onto certain actions. Because attunement and presence is also the discernment where we feel, “Oh, now somebody is actually in a disrelated way, bypassing a certain dimension of life.” But actually another person that does something that looks very similar is not bypassing. And the assessment lies again, in the attuned relating that I cannot have a fixed idea about bypassing, but I actually need to have a moment to moment to moment assessment of life.
And that moment to moment assessment of life is a constant practice of presence and is so important because otherwise we end up in exactly what you said. And that is a kind of fashionable word, but we are putting it like a poster on everything because of the very thing we are doing the very thing that we are talking, that we are saying.
Bayo: I have half a mind for us right now, brother in this conversation to institute a new word and call it double bypassing. But I fear that immediately we say double bypassing. That in itself will lead to a triple bypassing.
Thomas: A blue city instead of a red city. Right.
Bayo: Yes.
Thomas: But that’s beautiful because, again, everything is either attuned and is in relationship or is actually doing the very thing that it describes.
Bayo: Yeah. We’re repeating. We’re using the epistemology and the resources of the very thing we’re critiquing to critique, and therefore we become part of that, the conditionality of its sustenance.
Thomas: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That’s very beautiful. So thank you for that. That was a great reminder of how important it is to stay related. And then that informs me what’s bypassing and whatnot, but it’s becomes a thing by itself.
Bayo: Yes.
Thomas: By the way, it’s so lovely to talk to you. I mean, I feel very energized that I could go on for a long time, but I see our time. So is there anything given our conversation that you want to mention before we conclude here?
Bayo: Maybe I’ll add something else. Jean Oury would speak about in a conversation and interview he had that was called The Hospital is Ill. Jean Oury was one of the early founders and operators of La Board, which is where Deleuze… Not Deleuze, Guattari and Delani did some work post Second World War, France. He would say the hospital is ill. And I just want to use that to launch into a brief noticing that sometimes it is the case. We can speak about the spirituality of the individual. And by that I mean all the forces and tensions and attentional spaces that give rise to the culture and to the worlding creativity of the individual with all its troubles attached, that spirituality is traveling now itself, that spirituality is breaking down and it’s dissipating cracks in its architecture so that new forms of spirituality are emerging now, brother.
And that’s what I would think of as the spirituality of the cracks. And the spirituality of the cracks is not about… It’s not a dismissal of healing as a paradigm as much as it is a troubling or calling into question of the individual as a monolith, the individual as the dissociated self. It’s calling on different kinds of fidelities, different kinds of practices. And the only way we get there is collective experimentation, right? It’s a politics of collective experimentation whose legacies go back all the way to Indigenous insights about the archetype of the trickster. When things start to break and spill, you need to travel. Go with the tension, go with the trouble.
If you stay put in your idea of, “I’m at home and I’m all good, I’m well, it’s whole”, then you might be frozen in that carceral space. So I think at least for some of us, hopefully for many of us, it’s time to travel. It’s time to travel. Home is no longer homely or hospitable. It’s time to travel.
Thomas: That’s fantastic. I love it. I love it. Bayo, thank you so much. This is a great contribution to our community here and I’m sure that many people will enjoy and really feel moved by the movement of our conversation. So thank you so much. It’s lovely to see you and I hope—
Bayo: Thank you, brother.
Thomas: —for more conversations and enjoy.
Bayo: As always.
Thomas: Yeah. Right. As always.
Bayo: Thank you, brother.
Thomas: Thank you so much.
