A Physiological Birthright?
Illumination, Enlightenment & Mission:Impossible
On this Porch, Laura Hope-Gill illuminates what she brilliantly calls the “physiological birthright” of enlightenment - not over above or against other people or species, but interdependent with all of life. We’re graced also by Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s visual poems about living in the moment we find ourselves in. Finally, I talk with Jett Loe about Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, which in a genuine surprise is one of the most wholeheartedly entertaining blockbusters, and actually advocates a whole-world (maybe even a cosmic) sense of ourselves, who we should care for, and how to end lethal conflict without repeating it.
Wishing you every good thing, in a spirit of courage, creativity, and community.
PS: We’ll be announcing next year’s Porch Gathering soon - but you can save the date now: April 17th-19th, 2026 (with a pre-gathering event on the evening of April 17th and during the day of the 18th), near Asheville, NC.
Illumination in the Gut: Enlightenment as Physiological Birthright (excerpt) - Laura Hope-Gill
Anatomy and physiology are often linked and equated with destiny and identity. Such equations lead to exclusion and persecution as often as they lead to lionization and privilege. Color of skin, height, physical strength, gender-at-birth, sexuality, race, neurology, ability, and reproductive organs throughout history summarily lead to legislation for either protection or reduction of protections under the law. Never does the body entirely define a person, and yet there is always somebody or some group ready to declare that it does—women must have babies; tall, Black people must play sports; people with certain reproductive organs should be paid 30% more than people with other kinds of reproductive organs. The list of claims goes on.
In the West, our bodies, it is claimed, define us. They are not only what we are but who. In such a reductive culture as ours, versed in correlation mistaken for causation, science justifies atrocity more often than it directs our attention toward compassion. In the West, we are led to conclude, the body is an agent of war and the brain an agent of judgment. Such reasoning leads us to believe that life is for suffering for some and for inflicting suffering for others. In light of current scientific research, though, a body part has announced itself as the balance to the rule we are told our bodies must obey. Its mere existence within us proves that our bodies, when fully considered and engaged, are agents of peace and well-being. In my forthcoming book, I will show you that life is for joy, love, and compassion and that each of us is biologically destined to be kind.
At the start of the pandemic, I told my daughter, then a junior in high school, that we should each choose a self-improvement project so we would not turn into potatoes. She chose to heal her trauma with books and therapy. I chose to attain enlightenment. I wanted to attain enlightenment because every power structure in the West is predicated on the notion that the people filling its posts are "enlightened," or closer to it than the rest of us. All the power of these systems is derived from the implied impossibility of the everyday person's ever attaining enlightenment. Because it is impossible--so impossible that a tiny handful of people who lived long, long ago made it--we are told we need to be "led."
Think about it a second: humankind survived for 50,000-200,000 years before the Age of Reason, but we who eschewed creative imagination three centuries ago are in real danger. In 300 years we have demolished the planet and have antipaths running the country, whom none of the "enlightened-or-close-to-it" other people can solve. The Enlightenment failed. It failed because it took the material, five-sense path, which requires no imagination. Enlightenment isn't about being really smart by residing entirely in the intellect. It's about being universally compassionate by dwelling wholly in the gut, intellect's superior: intuition, the predominant mechanism for knowing what sustains survival.
While it is out of reach through "the pure light of reason alone,” it is readily available through the one thing we have not been encouraged to practice for three centuries. Creative Imagination. Enlightenment requires intense creative imagination, for this is how we develop the imaginal world of which the temporal/ontological world is a shadow. The reality is the wholeness. One world informs another. We need both. This explains why Indigenous cultures prize storytelling in its archaic forms. We enter the primordial story when we attain enlightenment. It flows into us, healing us. We ferment using stories, and this extends our life as much as it extends the life of fermented cabbage for instance. Without this vital information, we haven’t known that fermentation is not only available to all of us but that we have a body part that specifically serves this physiological mechanism, what we call "the gut."
Shifting into this body part in later life defines enlightenment. We go into the gut for short visits while we grow up so that when we reach mid-life we have prepared a place for ourselves there in consciousness. We find all we lost. And we take this imaginal version of all we lost with us when we depart our bodies. Doesn't this make so much more sense than any of the other things? Once we are in the gut for good, we fuse to nature in perfect intuition, and nature lures and leads us. The elders communicate these steps to the community, and the community lives on. Never once do we take our eyes off the unseen. Generation after generation parlays what we need to know. It even has a voice and talks in low tones. Much of the time, it sings.
We humans survived for so long by listening and learning from it. It gave us language and music. It gave us instructions for making fire. It led us through its music to wild strawberries and soon after taught us how to ferment them. Then it taught us how to ferment ourselves with our stories of the experiences nature created for us—so we could give it back in telling. That is the deal. It is the deal still, and we’re not holding up our side. We never took credit for the work of nature. The gut is the talk of the town now because nature is still guiding us, and we've become slightly better listeners. Once again, though, the theoretical language complicates things by leaving intentional engagement of creativity. At best the word is included in a list of things we find in the gut. Creativity isn't "in" the gut. It is the gut. That's what it is for. Knowing we have a bodily mechanism for transformation, we can take enlightenment down from its highest shelf and restore its attainment to everybody. It's literally within, but with a secret passageway to beyond. We need that “beyond” because that’s our life force source. We are dying without it. Shrinking ego takes discipline and is painful, but we must do it to get back on track.
Our holy books and sacred practices, preserved throughout the science years, provide clear guidelines for gut-dwelling. The ancestors saw how we could lose sight of imagination’s physiological home in the body, so they made maps for our return on parchment. Abide by them closely, they say, and you’ll enter the primordial mind. I went all-in on these without exception or rationalization. I committed to burning away the ego. Some nights I wanted to scream. Some nights I did. I held fast though, using tools from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Kaballah, Christianity, Islam, and Romantic Poetry, all teachings in fermenting the self into the soul using imagination. These words delivered the goods far beyond meditation. That stuff is the user manual for self and soul.
From Judaism, the Ten Commandments limit our conduct. Not being allowed to lie, we must live a life that requires no deceit. We must be open with everybody. If we can’t tell the truth, we are deceiving ourselves and others, which goes against the laws of community. If we can’t kill anybody, we must observe our rage and deal with it. If we can’t have sex with somebody else’s partner or just anyone we want, we must address our craving. These ten rules are not about right and wrong. They are about cultivating compassion. When we live in compassion we stop seeing other people and things as “needs.” We can appreciate their beauty without having to possess and control it.
These tablets reflect the kleshas of Buddhism and complement the seven deadly sins, ever winnowing away our ego by forcing us to cease looking and reaching and blaming all that is outside our selves with pride, rage, craving, jealousy, and ignorance regarding the dual nature of reality. When moving through the process of the Lojong Slogans of Buddhism, I consistently envisioned Shiva of Hinduism destroying the aspects of my personality, while breathing Buddhism’s Tonglen and recalling the Psalm, “You will feel anger. Sit on your bed and meditate.” We each have a path to get life on earth in balance. If we're all worked up over our stressors and other people’s behavior, it can't reach us. The process awakens our heart by breaking it. This is tantra: instead of getting what you want, you feel the pain of not getting it. This sharpens our perception, and enlightenment is about perception. The burning pain of not-having is essential.
Enlightenment is seeing both sides of reality, intellect for the material and imagination for the imaginal, as our ancient ancestors did. It’s our reset where our emotions, perverted by ego, return to their original states. Love is for community. Want is for nourishment. Fear is for reaching out for comfort. Anger is for nothing at all. When we settle into the gut, we make sense again after far too long. This settling is not out of reach, nor is it connected to judgment, as we have conflated in the West. This said, it isn't a cakewalk. To attune to the earth, we have to de-attune to our individual wants and control. We hand these over to their aligned aspects: perceiving the voice of nature. The Age of Reason is predicated on transcending superstition with hard-core reality, which, as we are finding, is actually magical and supernally sensory. Real reality stands over linear logic, earning it the name superstition and that explains why the empire wanted to be rid of it. We have a deeper empire inside that holds the whole of the universe.
I recently saw a photograph of one of four framed human nervous systems dissected from a body. Sure enough, it looks like a holy spirit inside us. It resembles a shroud, explaining why in scripture Christ is wrapped in it following torture and death. It is also a tree and a cross draped with tattered cloth. It calls to mind “the voice in the wilderness” in the way it touches everything from inside this darkness. To hear and follow it is to be washed in eternal love. Writing and storytelling heal us because we deliver unto it our strong emotion and knowledge of language, and it gives shape to them in such a way that reveals the value of our suffering. Every time. We give it mud. It gives us lotus. Every time.
Laura Hope-Gill is the director the Creative Writing of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at the Thomas Wolfe MFA Creative Writing Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. You can find more of her work at laurahopegill.com and Laura Hope-Gill’s Quiet World.
You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (excerpt) - Madeleine Jubilee Saito
From Jasmin Pittman: I first encountered Madeleine’s work through Janisse Ray’s, “Journaling the Garden” workshop series, where we were both guest presenters. If you aren’t familiar with Janisse, or Madeleine, I can’t say enough good things about them both, particularly if you’re interested in the intersections of belonging, the natural world, and unveiling the sacred.
Madeleine’s new book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis offers a mixed-genre approach I wasn’t immediately familiar with, but thrilled to discover—poetic comics. Just as poetry offers more space on the page and therefore silence between lines than prose typically does, comic art, too, can give space for the movement between panels, the transformations we envision just beyond the page.
I’m pleased The Porch is able to publish an excerpt from You Are a Sacred Place, a collection of poetic comics described as a “series of ethereal vignettes that takes readers on a journey from seemingly inescapable isolation and despair, through grief and rage, toward the hope of community and connection.” In this tenth section offered here, I love the way she represents a whole world of living things that work in tandem with each other to create a sense of communal presence and care, while also maintaining a sense of autonomous sovereignty. The art is quiet, soft, and invitational, almost like taking a deep breath to reorient the spirit around a deeper truth just thrumming beneath the surface.
Take a peek, take a breath, and let us know what you think!
Madeleine Jubilee Saito is a cartoonist living on Duwamish land in Seattle, Washington.
MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING
Click here for an episode of The Film Talk, with Porch co-founder Gareth Higgins and Jett Loe.