by Mark A. Shryock
https://markashryock.substack.com/p/who-gets-a-seat-at-the-fire
People come to my house from time to time because of the writing. Most of them have read something of mine and want to sit and talk, and most of the time they are good visits. Once in a while, though, someone comes who is really disappointed in who I am. They expected a spiritual giant, and they found a human being.
It happened again not long ago. A woman came to the house, spent some time with me, and told me I am so different online than I am in real life. In real life, she said, I am just as fucked up as the rest of us.
We had a good hike and visit. But the point is she wanted me to be something I am not. Or at the very least she was disappointed in who I was. She did not come to meet me. She came to meet the man she had pictured from the writing. I think she was expecting somebody very perfect, somebody who was not vulnerable, somebody who hid their shortcomings. I am just the opposite. I am overweight. I am Santa Clause all year long and for two months out of the year I have the enormous sacred privilege of wearing the suit and being very special to all children young and old. And I look the part. Cookies see me and flee in terror. I have a lot of flaws. I am not perfect, and I am pretty much an open book. It has taken me a lifetime to learn to be comfortable with who I am. She had me up on a pedestal, and when she met the real man, the pedestal came down.
I want to talk about that, because what she expected of me is what a lot of people expect of 5D, and it is wrong.
WHOLE IS HOLY
Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that spiritual evolution means becoming perfect. If you are really walking the path, you float a few inches off the ground, you speak softly about everything, nothing angers you, nothing grieves you, and you never have a hard word for anyone. That is what a lot of people expect.
It is a lie, and it is a dangerous one.
5D has nothing to do with perfection. It never did. It has to do with being whole, accepting all of who you are, and integrating your shadow instead of hiding it. Holy and whole come from the same root. To be holy is to be whole, and to be whole is to accept all of who you are, not just the presentable parts. Your anger is yours. Your grief is yours. Your shadow is yours. The work is not cutting those parts off so other people will think you are enlightened. The work is integrating them, owning them, bringing them into the light and making peace with them until they stop running you from the basement.
We are meant to experience every emotion, not only the pleasant ones. Rage is part of the curriculum. So is sorrow. So is fear. A man who has cut himself off from his anger has not transcended anything. He has only lost a part of himself, and it will come out sideways in ways he cannot see.
Somewhere along the way a lot of spiritual teaching decided that anger means you failed, that a boundary means you are not loving enough, and that the goal is to float above your own humanity on a pink cloud of unicorns and honey and rainbows. I do not believe that is what 5D was ever meant to be. Christ got angry.
I write spiritual pieces, I write analytics, and I write about prepping, because I think it is important to talk to all three of those audiences. People who come in through the analytics end up reading the spiritual work, and some of them will move on into 5D. There are three waves, and I believe reaching across them is my mission. So I am careful about one thing. I do not want anyone seeing me as someone who is spiritually perfect.
I am not a finished product. I wrestle with the very things this piece is about. I wrestle with anger at what is being done in this country. I wrestle with where the line is between protecting what is good and becoming hard myself. I am asking hard questions here, and I am not asking them from a mountaintop. I am asking them from the middle of the mess, same as you.
UNITY IS NOT TOLERATING EVERYTHING
The lie about perfection comes with a second lie tied to its tail. The second lie says that spiritual people must accept everyone and love everything that everybody does. It says we are all one, so there is no such thing as a door. It says everyone you meet is an aspect of yourself, a mirror, a teacher, and shutting anyone out is really shutting out a part of you.
The first part of that is fine. Maybe everyone is an aspect of us. But being an aspect of us does not mean we have to tolerate who they are.
Here, in this life, that aspect may be living in ego. They stayed in 3D. They never did the shadow work in 4D, and they are not going to do it, not in this lifetime. An aspect like that is not your teacher, and it is not a mirror that helps you. It is a person who has refused to look at themselves, and because they will not look, they project. Everything they cannot face, every fear, every ugliness, every piece of their own shadow, gets thrown outward onto other people. Onto you. Onto anyone who is not like them.
That is what is happening right now. Wave after wave of light is being dumped into the planet. It touches humanity and every other life form on Earth, and what it does depends on which way a person is moving. If someone is moving into 3D, the light makes them even more scared. If someone is moving toward 5D, it wakes them up. The same light that is waking so many of us is driving the others deeper into their fear, and they grow more fearful every day. Fear always looks for a target. They project it out onto anyone who is not like them, they have become afraid of anyone who is different, and they have made cruelty into a virtue and a sport.
The golden rule still stands. I believe we are meant to love everyone and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But I do not believe we are meant to live inside toxic energy. Unity does not mean accepting everyone. It does not mean loving everything that everybody does, and it does not mean there is no such thing as a door.
The soft teachers never draw one distinction, and it is the one that matters most. Forgiving someone and letting them back into what you are building are two completely different things. Releasing blame is inner work. It happens inside you, for you, so the poison does not sit in your own gut. But who you trust, who you build with, who you share your food and your plans and your fire with, is a boundary, and a boundary is not hatred. You can release a person entirely and still never hand them the keys to your house. Anyone who tells you those two things are the same is telling you to leave your door open to whoever wants to walk through it, and calling that spirituality does not make it wise.
THE LESSON OF THE NARCISSIST AND THE EMPATH
Why does the narcissist and empath relationship even exist, if the lesson is not for the empath to love themselves, to give to themselves, and to stop allowing people to take so much?
I have a family member who is as extractive as a person gets. He has screwed over everybody around him, and he is never going to change. For years I thought the answer was more patience, or finding the right words that would finally reach him. The lesson was never about changing him. It was about learning to love myself enough to stop letting him take.
Many of you have someone like that in your own family. The same dynamic is now playing out across whole nations, and millions of people are paying for it.
WHAT THE MASTERS ACTUALLY TAUGHT
The people preaching unconditional togetherness have clearly not read the masters, because every one of them addressed this, and not one of them taught passive submission to what is wrong.
Shortly before the Buddha died, he gave his monks a final instruction about a monk named Channa, a man who was arrogant, dismissive, and would not take correction from anyone. The Buddha did not order him beaten or expelled or cursed. He ordered something quieter and far heavier. He told the monks to stop speaking to Channa, stop advising him, and stop correcting him. Channa could say whatever he wanted, and they would give him nothing back. It is called the brahmadanda, and it is total non-engagement, with no punishment and no crusade, only the complete withdrawal of energy and attention. According to the texts, it broke Channa’s pride open like nothing else could have. He changed, and he later became fully awakened. The door was never locked. He had to walk through it himself.
Christ did not go through the world smiling at everything and absorbing every abuse. He walked into the temple, saw the money changers turning his Father’s house into a market, overturned their tables, and drove them out with a whip of cords. That is righteous anger, and it is in the book these people claim to read. He told his disciples that when a town refused to receive them, they should shake the dust off their feet and walk on. He did not tell them to argue for six months or chase the town down and beg it to understand. He told them to leave. He warned them not to cast their pearls before swine, which means there are people who will trample the most sacred thing you carry, and you are under no obligation to keep handing it to them.
The Prophet Muhammad told his followers to help their brother whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed. When they asked how you help an oppressor, he said you help him by stopping him from oppressing. He forbade aiding oppressors and affirming their lies. He taught that one of the greatest struggles is speaking a word of truth in front of a tyrant, and that when people see an oppressor and do nothing to stop him, the whole community will pay for it. Silence in the face of the oppressor is not neutrality. It is participation, and the bill comes due for everyone.
Every one of these traditions carries the same shape. Withdraw your energy from what is wrong. Do not punish, do not crusade, do not hate. But do not engage, do not feed the behavior, do not house it, and do not pretend. The way back is always open for the one who genuinely changes, the way it was for Channa. What is being withdrawn is not love. What is being withdrawn is access.
We have a word for this today, and people use it like an insult, so I want to take it back. The word is shunning. Shunning is not stoning, and it is not cruelty. Shunning is the community’s immune system, the oldest spiritual technology there is for saying this behavior does not live here. Serious traditions around the world have practiced it for thousands of years, because it works without violence. It starves the behavior instead of fighting the person. I believe it is what we are going to have to do.
THE DUTY TO SPEAK OUT
This did not stop in ancient times. Gandhi built a movement that broke an empire on one principle, non-cooperation with evil. He held that refusing to cooperate with evil is as much a duty as cooperating with good. He did not hate the British. He refused to lend them his hands.
Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Riverside Church in New York in 1967 and spoke out against the Vietnam War when many of his own supporters wanted him to stay quiet. He told them that a time comes when silence is betrayal, and he did not say it from a comfortable chair.
Rabindranath Tagore spent his life writing about a human community built on dignity, the kind that cannot exist where cruelty is normalized. In 1919, after British troops massacred unarmed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he gave back his British knighthood. He would not wear an honor from the hand that did that. This is the same man who wrote of a place where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.
None of them taught hatred. None of them told their followers to attack anyone. They withdrew. They refused to cooperate. They spoke out. They protected the vulnerable. These people understood that when the hour gets dark, speaking out is not politics. It is spiritual responsibility, and it is how you protect the vulnerable when everything begins to fall.
WHAT THEY ARE CHEERING
Imagine being a child and having your leg cut off with no anesthetic. In Gaza this is happening. Gaza has more child amputees per capita than anywhere else in the world, and they do not even have anesthetic, because the hospitals have been bombed and there is nothing left to give them. Why are we allowing that? Those who cheer it on believe it is fine, because in their Christian nationalism whatever Israel does is fine, and the United States is sending billions of dollars a year to Israel. Gaza has been pummeled, there is genocide, and there is starvation, famine produced by policy.
Here at home, people are being rounded up as immigrants and sent to countries they have never been to in their lives, with no money and no way to get back even to their own country. A father was sent to Liberia, a country that is not even his own. He has four children, and two of them are American citizens. In all likelihood, all four of his children will never see their father again. This is wrong on so many levels.
Dreamers, people who were brought here as children, some as babies and some a little older, who grew up in our schools and know no other country, are being taken right out of college and sent away to places they have never lived. I know what these young people are like. I know how hard they try.
People are sitting in concentration camps right now. People are being rounded up and put in them. If you look up the definition of a concentration camp, that is what these are, and we are still arguing about what to call them.
It reaches far beyond this country. The Philippines economy is crashing, and other economies are crashing with it. In country after country there are riots in the streets, because people cannot get by any longer because of Trump’s war with Iran. There are people in Europe going into winter without fuel. Millions are going into this winter with skyrocketing heating bills and no money to buy heat. Now famine is being produced by this. And Trump comes on and talks about waiting until after the midterms, as if everything will be fine then. This war should have been stopped yesterday. It never should have begun. So many people are suffering because of it.
Then I watched Trump speak at the United Nations and say to the world that he has to decide whether or not to completely destroy Iran. A nation of ninety million human beings, spoken about like a real estate problem. I thought, my God, is this what we have become as a nation? I am stunned that people still support this man. And yet they do, in the millions.
There is no compassion there, and no care for the millions who are suffering. What I cannot get past is not only that these things are happening, though that is horror enough. It is that people are cheering for them.
A writer named Adam Serwer said it back in 2018, and it has only gotten more true since. The cruelty is the point. The suffering is not a side effect these people are willing to tolerate. The suffering is what they came for, because every deported father and every bombed hospital proves their side has power and the other side does not. Psychologists have a precise word for taking pleasure in someone else’s pain, and the word is sadism. When a person can watch a child operated on without anesthesia and feel good about it, that person’s compass is not pointing in a different direction than mine. It is smashed.
TWO QUESTIONS
It all comes down to a question each consciousness asks.
3D asks what it can get from you while giving the least. How much can it get from you? What can it extract from you, and what is the minimum it has to give back to get it?
5D asks a different question. What is my gift, and how do I give it for the greatest good of all, including myself? The gift includes food and things.
People get that second question wrong. It says including yourself. It does not mean taking everything you have and giving it away overnight. Giving everything away is martyrdom, and martyrdom is just extraction pointed inward. Stewardship means you hold what you have been given, you tend it, and you ask how it can do the most good for the whole, with you counted in the whole, because you are part of it.
Nowhere do these two questions show themselves more clearly than in prepping, and this is why I write about it.
I call our group on Facebook a community, and I hope we are a community of loving empaths. But I have had people come into this very community and tell the rest of you not to tell anyone you have food. Do not tell anyone what you have stored. Someone will take it from you. I went and looked at who was saying that, and they were Christian evangelicals and MAGA, and I knew they would be before I ever looked. It is the extractive mind wearing a cross, the 3D question out loud. Hide what you have. Trust no one. Your neighbor is a threat who has not acted yet.
The other answer is simple. If we come together as a community, if we actually stand together, nobody is going to take anything from us. A hundred households that know and trust each other cannot be picked off. Fifty people hoarding alone in fifty separate houses can be picked off one at a time, and scared, isolated people make terrible decisions. The fearful prepper hoarding in the dark is not safer than the community. He is only lonelier while he waits.
We should not be afraid to talk about prepping or about having food stored. We should be talking about it openly, because talking about it is how the network forms. Communities are going to form very naturally as things stop working. It is already beginning, and it will speed up. And I believe the extractors will try to come into our communities. They will see the warmth and the organization and the stored food, and they will come to the gate speaking our language. So we have to be exact about the difference between the gate and the fire.
THE GATE AND THE FIRE
If a starving person shows up at our gate, we feed them. I do not care who they voted for. I do not care what they cheered for. You do not answer hunger with hunger, and the day we let a starving person turn away from our gate unfed is the day we have become the thing we are separating from. I do not see us behind a barbed wire fence in some compound, glaring at the world through a gunsight. That is the extractive mind’s fantasy of survival, and I want no part of it.
But feeding a person at the gate and inviting them to sit at your fire are two different things, and the distance between them is the whole teaching.
The fire is the community. The fire is where decisions get made, where children sleep, where the stored food and the trust and the plans for the future live. People who are cheering for cruelty right now, who are fine with the camps and the fatherless children and the bombed hospitals, should not be in our community. We should not offer them a bed or a place to stay. They should not be sitting at our fire at night. We do not hate them. They have shown us, in the clearest possible terms, what they are willing to be okay with, and a community is only as strong as its trust. You cannot build a high trust community out of people whose compass is smashed, any more than you can build a house out of rotten timber because you feel sorry for the timber.
I have already drawn this line in my own life. I have told my friends, my past friends, and professors I had relationships with that if you support this, I do not want you in my life. Why would I choose to be around energy that is the opposite of everything I stand for?
We are too different, and we are only going to keep moving farther apart. The distance between those who are doing the work and those who are projecting their shadow onto everyone unlike themselves is widening by the month. The separation so many of us sense coming is not a rapture, and it is not a punishment handed down from the sky. It is what happens when some people choose extraction and other people choose the gift. Oil and water were never going to hold.
KEEPING THE RECORD
We have a responsibility to speak out against this, especially in this hour, as everything begins to fall. Protecting the vulnerable is the work.
And I think we need to begin now keeping track of who these people are. Who cheered. Who made excuses. Who reposted the cruelty, who wrapped it in a flag or a cross and called it righteousness. Lest we ever forget what was done in this hour, and in whose name it was done: Christian evangelical nationalism, MAGA, Make America Great Again, and every movement in every other country where people are doing this, because this is not only ours.
This is not a list for revenge. Nobody is coming for anyone. The pen is the only weapon here. But memory is a form of stewardship, and a people who refuse to remember will hand the keys to the same men twice. When things get hard, and they are going to get hard, the ones who cheered for the camps will show up at our gates speaking soft words. Some of them will truly be hungry, and we will feed them, because that is who we are. Some of them will want a seat at the fire, and that is when memory matters. A person who was fine with the camps last year has not earned a voice in our community this year, no matter how cold it has gotten.
The door back exists. It has always existed. It is called change, real change, the kind that takes shadow work and amends and time. Channa walked through it. Anyone can. But the door is walked through by the one who changed. It is not held open by us pretending the cheering never happened.
At this point, if you have not looked at all of this and said this is wrong, then something is wrong with you.
I started this piece with a visitor who expected a spiritual giant and found a human being. The other side of that same truth is this. Being whole means I do not get to cut off the parts of myself that are angry at what is being done. My anger at the camps is mine. My refusal to smile and unify with people who cheer for starving children is mine, and it is holy, because holy means whole, and a whole man does not hand his fire over to people with smashed compasses and call it love.
How can anyone be okay with a child being operated on without anesthesia? How can anyone be okay with a father being ripped from his four children and sent to a country that is not even his? How can anyone be okay with people freezing this winter, economies crashing, riots in the streets, famine, and camps? How can we support anybody who supports this? Why would we want to be around these people?
I do not want them sitting by my fire.