I have long been a fan of Hunter S. Thompson (as you can see from the pic of me at Burning Man in 2006.)  Not his life, or even really his work, although I do enjoy his work a great deal.  I am a fan of his methodology.  Not his style, but the method he used to produce his style.  That methodology, of course, is Gonzo Journalism.  There is much dispute about the origins of the term Gonzo, what it actually means and what it does.  The term has been popularized, and used in different realms, to the point that the term is becoming ambiguous almost to the point of uselessness.

For the purposes of this article I want to be specific about the definition of Gonzo Journalism that I am using.

Gonzo Journalism is a style of journalism which is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first person narrative. The style tends to blend factual and fictional elements to emphasize an underlying message and engage the reader.

In the framework of Gonzo Journalism, the writer is an inherent part of the story being told.  The inescapable fact that the author of any story cannot be separated from the story is embraced rather than reduced. There is also a free hand taken with mixing fiction in with the facts of the story, blurring the line between them that is always hard to find, using metaphor, allegory, shock, and humor to draw attention to the point and moral (if any) of the story. I have always admired the simple honesty of this approach.  For my own part the world of journalism is not one I have been able to find a place in, but this methodology still rings true for me.

So, in an attempt to find a way to integrate the methodology into my own interests, I have come up with the following:

Gonzo Spirituality

In this approach the individual seeker on the spiritual path is brought to the forefront.  They are an active participant in their own realization, enlightenment, salvation.  In the spirit of Gonzo Journalism, the seeker can be brought to not only an equal footing with whatever path, or approach they are studying and practicing, but should become the center piece of the story.

(Warning: Several gross generalizations follow.  I assure you they are here only to stress a point.  Mostly.)

In the typical way that spiritual practice is handled, meaning the non-gonzo way, the "inner secrets", "special practices", "advanced understandings", and "true path" (ie - the real good shit) is held behind a flimsy curtain of authority.  It is believed that "beginners" and "lay people" and "John Q. Public" is just not up to handling the real stuff.  They can't cut the mustard.  They have to be sheltered and shepherded for their own good.  In the mean time they are good enough to provide tithes, donations, and life support to the structure of priests, gurus, gate keepers, "attained" ones, and any of the bureaucracy needed to run the church/ashram/commune/whatever.

Gonzo Spirituality (tm) says "Bollocks on that!"  Any spiritual path may have stages of practice and progress that build on each other.  That's really fine.  The Gonzo Spiritualist doesn't have an issue with that.  What the Gonzo Spiritual Seeker does have a problem is not knowing that.  Not knowing that the higher ups are holding onto some teachings to hit you with later, is a problem.  But, even worse is not understanding a reason for that holding back.  This is good old Modernism style skepticism at its actual finest.  There is a very valid reason why skepticism can be healthy and useful.  The Gonzo Seeker embraces skepticism and uses it in a skillful way to their own advantage.

One of the key points of Gonzo Spirituality is that not only is the seeker moved into a primary position and take at least some of the spotlight, but they also take the great sages that history has carried forward at their word.  That often comes in different methods, and phrases, but it boils down to something like, "You, the seeker, are trying to liberate you, the seeker, so obviously you, the seeker, must do the work.  You must liberate you, for yourself."

From that point follows the next.  It's your fault.  You are responsible.  Do not hand over your power to an authority figure, along with the responsibility for your life.  The Gonzo Seeker steps into the spotlight not only to take on all the benefits and accolades (although those rock), but they also accept the blame (at least their portion) for any fumbles and foibles.  Sorry folks, gotta take the bad along with the good.

There are, just as their are in any style of spiritual pursuit (or any pursuit for that matter), plenty of more key points that could be thrown into the gonzo bucket.  It's a creative way to be engaged and responsible for your own progress.  But, me throwing a bunch out there would make this more and more about my interpretation.  That's not very gonzo.  I would love to hear what other folks think about this topic, and invite as many comments as you can muster!

"We might think we can find a buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond this mind; we might think we can find serenity, clarity, and meaning beyond this mind, but such place does not exist. Everything that appears is this mind." ~ Bodhidharma

Please note that the above is, like anything said, just an opinion.  The heart of Gonzo Spirituality rabidly defends the right of anyone to pursue a path in a way which works for them.   That may, or may not, be the Gonzo way.  As long as it's working I would not dream of knocking it. Really.

From a comment to Spiritual Experience vs. Realization (or What’s The Point, Anyway?), over at MommyMystic.com:

If part of what you are saying here is that the main plus of formal spiritual practice is that eventually you give up on it, and then are truly able to surrender, then I have to say, YES, it does seem to happen that way for some people.

It's the same with dieting.  We diet until we don't need to anymore.  This gets much more complicated when it comes into contact with reality, however.  A person is morbidly obese, they have a sudden flash that they need to do something about it.  They pick up a diet and start working it.  Often they persist in the diet until they get to a weight that seems to make them happy, and then they drop the diet and gain back some, or all, or even more of the weight.  The happiness fades and they pick up the same diet again, or turn away from it with a sense of betrayal and seek another diet.

The roller coaster continues.  The seeker of a thin body continues the search, does the work, drops the diet cause they are "done", gains back the weight and so on.  The long term damaging effects to the seeker's health that this pattern causes are well documented, and depressing.  Still the well documented fact often don't make much of an impression to the person caught in the yo-yo cycle since their immediate experience is one based on emotion, feelings of desperation, hope, depression, fear, isolation and dread.

Eventually, with a little bit of luck, or perhaps a momentary crack in the cycle brought about by some external circumstance, or internal clarity, a change takes place.  The seeker becomes more concerned with making a permanent change to their lifestyle rather than a quick fix. They look to trying to feel and be healthy rather than feeling and being thin.  At that point the word dreaded at many a weight loss support group rears it's maligned head: maintenance.

When stuck in the yo-yo pattern of the thin-body seeker, the word maintenance sounds like just more work.  It implies that the pain and discontent we feel while locked into an obese body will never end.  It dashes hope of some sunny hereafter where we can finally eat whatever we want, in whatever amounts, and never gain a pound.  Just like those lucky few metabolic freaks we know who we both despise and long to be.  (Substitute here the person who never seems to be terribly unhappy and inherently free of the existential angst which is the seed affliction of spiritual seeking.)

When we make the shift away from the yo-yo cycle, through whatever means, and turn from thin-body seeker to healthy body path walker (those names need a little work), maintenance becomes not a burden but instead an expression of all the lessons we have digested along the way.  We make healthier food choices, and move our bodies in enjoyable ways more often, because that is the person we have become.  Maintenace is no longer drudgery, it is instinctual.

We have changed.  Somewhere along the way, as we express our new way of being in the world, we come to the realization that we are the same as we were when we started.  We were always just ourselves.  We just showed up for life in a different manner.

Your life is a conditioned one.  All aspects of it.  Everything you see, hear, think and do is modified by and works through conditions.  Your birth itself is conditional.  Without the conditions of your parents having had intercourse, you would not be. The food you eat, the rest you get, the motorists not running you down, your life depends on a thousand and one conditions every day.  Without these conditions you cease.

Likewise your decisions, comportment, and way of passing through life are all conditioned.  Your beliefs, culture, habits, and physical composition all impose themselves on how you perceive, and how you interact with the world.

For my part, when I am able to watch myself closely I see that all of the reasons and justifications for the actions I take come after the fact in 99 cases out of 100. I may have truly brilliant reasons for something I said, or an action I took, but almost all of them, almost all the time, bubble to the surface and are realized after the fact. This is my natural state of affairs, it is the sum and substance of the life I live.

Such conditioning is inescapable.  Some spiritual paths make a call for living an unconditioned life, living spontaneously in the moment, choicelessly aware.  I say bollocks.  Such a moment is much more likely to be accidental than not, and even then any thing done has a backdrop of conditions, even if one of the conditions is to be influenced by as few conditions as possible!  It's a goose-chase, and in my not very humble opinion something of a waste of time.

Now, having said all that I will say that something can still be done.  Just because our actions may be, for a large (if not most) part non-spontaneous, and driven by conditioning does not mean there is nothing to be done.  Quite the contrary.  What can be done is to modify the conditioning. You can "re-program" yourself in certain ways to have the habitual conditioned response produce results more in keeping with whatever set of ethics, and morals you may claim to have. The methods for doing this are myriad, and I would suggest that doing it for yourself is a hell of a lot saner and safer than having someone else do it for you.

• Journaling
• Meditation
• Psychotherapy
• Voice Dialogue
• Socratic Inquiry
• The Sedona Method
• A 4th-Step Inventory
• Reflection
• Daily reviews of our actions
• Scenario driven role-play
• Chaos Magik
• etc, etc, etc

All of these can be used to uncover our habitual actions and the net of conditioning we carry with us.  Likewise, simple "Aha!" moments of, "Why the hell did I do that?" are pure gold for showing us bald-faced the programming of conditions we carry with us.

A simple exercise I picked up from Robert Anton Wilson easily reveals the depths of this conditional existence, as well as it's inherit-ness and necessity.  Take a seat, put a blank piece of paper before you, and raise up a pen. (Note paper and pen are crucial to avoid ease of self-editing and second guessing while jotting the list.) Now, write down 10 "programs" that run in your life that keep that life going.  Don't get fancy.  If you're experience is anything like mine when doing this list you will have some entries which are purely physical in nature.  They are the basic running rules of the human-animal body, the conditions without which life would not sustain.  To me that was an "Aha!" moment of realizing just how ubiquitous, and needed, conditioning is.

We all see what is happening around us and to us through filters.  Our conditioning, our reality-tunnels, our meaning grids.  Whatever you wand to call them, they are there.  Another word for these filters might be our maps of reality.  Bearing in mind that the maps are never the territory, they can nevertheless prove immensely valuable when dealing with the overwhelming amount of input that we constantly receive as parts of reality.  Looking at, working with, and editing these maps consciously, I would argue, is better than the alternatives; either having them occur by accidental trial & error, or (and this is by far the most common) having them handed to us by others and taking them on without questioning their validity.

One of the maps I am very fond of is the Integral Model put forth by Ken Wilber and the other researchers at the Integral Institute.  It makes a (very good) attempt to be a model/map of the territory of all that is while remaining simple enough to use easily.  One of the basic components are the four quadrants of reality.  The idea here is not to pigeon-hole any particular occasion into one of these quadrants, but rather to recognize that any occasion can be looked at from these four distinct areas.

The four areas are made by crossing two borders.  The first border is the one between the interior feeling content of an occasion and its exterior form or composition.  This can be visualized as a square with what it feels like to be a thing on the left, and what that thing is constructed of on the right.  The next border is is the one between being a single instance of the thing being examined, and multiple instances.  On our square the upper half represents the single, the lower represents the plural.

There is a further distinction which need only be held lightly for the moment, which makes the four quadrants of the square into eight sections of a cube.  Namely the front of the cube being the structure of the particular quadrant, and the rear of the cube being the raw material of that quadrant.  In the upper right quadrant of the examination of a human being, the back of the cube would be the raw energetic and material bits, the front would be the organization of that stuff into atoms, molecule, cells, tissues, organs and what not.

If we examine a person in this model we see several areas where examination of the self can prove advantageous. In the rear of the upper right quadrant we can make sure we are getting proper nutrition to build the structures of the front of that quadrant and make sure proper healing and recovery are taking place.  We can look at our place in society in the lower right quadrant and consider our job, and our social actions.  We can look to the lower left and see how we are contributing to, and benefiting from our relationships and culture.

Now, to the point of this post.  The upper left quadrant.  This area is, in a nutshell, what it feels like to be a self, and the thoughts we juggle and recycle as we make our way through reality.  The front of that quadrant is somewhat (if we are being honest and authentic in communicating our feelings and thoughts) open to examination by others by means of psychological modeling and behavioral mapping.  The rear part though, the raw feel of being, is all us.  Anything we communicate about this region obviously passes through the right side of our cube, since that is where external communication takes place.  The inside (rear-upper-left) of our being is also not open to plumbing by anyone else.  Here, in this most intimate of realms, we are on our own.

No one can access, or make changes to the inside of us as individuals.  No one else can find the truth there.  No one can explore this region but us.  It is for that reason that I say that the Buddha never enlightened anyone.  He had no way of pushing a magic button in this area that would make us "get it."  That's why his dieing words were an exhortation to us to work out our own salvation and to do so diligently.  Those sentiments appear again and again in all of the mystic and wisdom traditions of the world. If we want work done here, we have to do it.

Another implication is that, if we want to work on the totality of what we are, we need to not ignore any of the sections of our cube.  I don't mean an exhaustive exercising and improvement in all these areas is necessary, but an occasional looking in and watering of these different portions of the garden of our life seems to me to be a good idea.