Holey Cow: the rear view of 2024 and before

and how to make a French Toast mess

Holey CoW: a rear-view of 2024

This rear-view review of Holey CoW's movements in 2024 is inspired by Cadell Last's Philosophy Portal year in review 2024/25, (https://substack.com/home/post/p-153901150?source=queue&autoPlay=false ), a monumental body of work that it is a privilege to be a small part of. Given the long-form project being attempted with the cow, such a review proves productive. It offers a way to tie up loose ends and incompletions from 2024, and in the very act of reflection, retrieval, and re-iteration, we will come to some of the core tenets that will guide the projects future movement.

From the perspective of rocks in space or from that of a psychotic, there is perhaps little difference between the repetitions we call days, weeks, months, years, and so on. But remember, the non-duped err! And so I do my best here in this ritual of renewal from the context of the festive season time-warp to engage that all too human capacity to bridge, differentiate, punctuate, and shape the flow of time in the onslaught of pure cosmic repetition such that by that effort time might reveal to us its latent musicality.

Or in Last's words:

"The New Year is here. Today I find the New Year as an important structural moment for reflection on what has passed, what has been achieved, and what might be possible moving forward. Such mental reflections are necessary to stay committed to thinking on the scale of long-term conceptual mediation in a world that is hyper-immediate and attentionalist, desperately drowning in its own excess."

So between my weak gesture to a background of cosmic-material indifference and Cadell's slow and hard Work of the Concept in the face of hyper-immediate and attentionalist culture, there is this very effort at review that you are reading, the Cow chewing the cud in 2024 and some years before that.

We end last year and begin this year with a new formulation of the project's work:

Conceiving the Body

(through Holey Cultures of Wisdom and Worship) - this is intentionally located in relation to Philosophy Portal's Work of the Concept.

"Interfacing Others"

One of the primary reasons for Holey Cow having an online presence was to create a platform from which I could reach out to others with whom I wished to speak. The unanticipated dimension has been how the body of Holey Cow begins to convey its own sort of Telos that extends beyond what I would have previously assumed my private interests and arcs of development might include. I desired to create a platform within the network and liminal web that I was being inspired by, so that I might participate more in that network and liminal web.

Given this desire to reach out to and host others, the first investment of Holey Cow this year was a Zoom account, and it proved completely worthwhile. Here are some of the conversations I had with others posted to YouTube:

Dave Gardner of Original Condition

Dave the Haptic Gardner and I had three rich discussions [Original Condition]

https://www.original-condition.com

1. From Oorleef (survival) to a Dancing Original Condition

2. "Excavating the Materials of the Universe with Dave Gardner" - Where we reflected on the retreat process and explored the map Dave has developed and employs in his work. Excavating the Materials of the Universe with Dave Gardner

3. "Hey Daniel, WTF you doing?" asks Dave Gardner…

Dave, along with Cadell, have been significant big (br)Other type presences for me. Dave and I have nurtured our conversation for a few years now, typically circling around questions like:

- What is the health of the Dancefloor?

- What is the traditionless tradition?

- What to do with nothing!?

- And recently: Is there a spiritual way to kill an animal?

Swami Rahasya of Advait Tantra

https://advaittantra.com/

Swami (Secret/Mystery/Hidden) RAHASYA and I had two transformative conversations last year after I read his book, then still named Rocky Horror Tantra, and reached out inviting him onto the cow:

1. Our first conversation approached the [Myth of the First Patriarch] that appears in his book

2. In our second conversation, we developed the frame of 'overview and single-pointedness' as an alternative to the well-worn 'masculine and feminine' whilst attempting, silly as we are, to make explicit a pedagogy of the implicit. Swami Rahasya Mystery School'n and an Implicit Pedagogy for the Overview.

Anton Krueger and Compassion's Assumption

Anton (

anatman

) and I explored compassion's assumption

that "no-one wills their own harm" in this conversation that arose out of a Facebook comment.

Gontse of Pyramid Energy

Gontse is the creator-poet behind https://www.youtube.com/@PyramidEnergy0 . Also a Johannesburg local, I reached out after the algorithm fed me one of her videos. In our conversation we discussed her creative process, her channel, and her audience which contains this 'electricity' generated by proximity between 'new-age' and Christian folk.

Youtube Series

We held two series on the YouTube channel with friends from my Philosophy studies at University:

Can Virtue be Taught?

First, Siphosihle Wotshela, Avuyile Mgudla and I gathered under the question ["Can Virtue be Taught?"]

with the aid of Plato's Protagoras and Meno.

Our inquiry led us to a kind of experimental-philosophical-research-finding in the virtue of appropriate opposition that we began to contemplate and enact between ourselves. Together we also came to the realization that we do not know the good for the other nor can we do what we conceive as being good for them. Instead, we can endeavor to follow what unfolds as intelligible and worthwhile between us and in doing so invite others into that activity.

Key insight: The virtue of appropriate opposition—engaging in dialogue without assuming knowledge of the other's good.

In our year-end reflection, Truth is that which runs after the Truth and Alienates it's Friends, we discovered an added dimension to appropriate opposition. It has to do with a Pragmatics of No-thingness and the insistence of the impossible subject, our very own being.

This had a natural or Hadley Grecia influenced gravity toward the being, person or character of virtue which became more the subject in the last conversations of the series. The final conversation in that series, linked above, proved a natural segue into the next series that was led by Hadley.

We set to wade into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with the question, can being be known? or

Being Knowable!?

HPoS (5) "Being Knowable!?" - The thing in and for itself, for an other.

We, who gathered initially with intention to form an NPO but who I now call naughty pirate philosophers, are set in the new year to explore the Kantian conception of Time and to pursue our conversation of the valences of Nihilism as they appear in our social being (nihilism as that condition when something in the pragmatics of no-thingness is going wrong).

Remixiticism and Experimentation in Liturgies of Lack

I continue to explore Remixiticism, a neologism from Graham St John's writing signalling an art form 'where popular culture is remixed for the purposes of mystical experience'. It's a form where synchronous, accidental, and excessively meaningful superpositions and juxtapositions of media propound in incredibly playful and hard to repeat ways to produce a state of wonder and enjoyed-disorientation.

- [Lekker local Last Judgment]

this is a mix of a talk given by Jonathan Pageau on the symbolism of the Last Judgment mixed with a collection released by local psytrance producers called "Local is Lekker"

- [Divine Intervention Linden] (https://open.substack.com/pub/holeycow/p/divine-intervention-linden-1-an-edible?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web ): this mixes some Lofi beats, Gregorian Chants, a Zizek soundbite and clip with a news piece on homelessness in a delta near my home.

I am still praying with the Police in Linden weekly and will include a reflection on that process in the weeks to come.

I continue to be interested in an attempt to replicate what I can only intimate are something like Peter Rollins' Liturgies of Lack, in my own context. For Christmas, inspired by the Integral Stage's Christmas Merriment of 2022, I invited some friends for a [Christmas Zoom merriment experiment]

This is where the tutorial for French Toast comes from

Otherwise on the remix side:

[New Testament Tao (lofi)]

Here, it is the basic gesture of Seraphim Rose's Enneads on the Eternal Tao which is worth amplifying. Seraphim Rose re-read the classic of the way from the revelation and incarnation of the way/word in Christ. In this way, he reads the Tao Te Ching as a contribution to the Old Testament corpus, where the 'ancient sage' was intuiting along with the Old Testament prophets the coming of the way, the way become flesh in Christ.

A Baboon's Religious Conversion

This year I was born again: convicted and baptised! Here's a [poetic expression]

of the moment and a poetic invocation for what was to follow with the Holey Cow.

It was also from this time and in this context that Cadell Last invited me onto his [Singularities series]

which explores the Theological and Religious from the position of first person experience/narrative.

The basic formula for my religious conversion was derived from Layman Pascal's distinction between Spiritual Process and Religion: Spiritual process is a kind of harmonisation of subsystems in the (in)dividual such that a kind of coherence and/or surplus is generated. Religious process is that self-same process in a larger social body, perhaps in the broadest sense 'our social body'.

In short and horribly simplistic terms, I reasoned: If breath carries this spiritual process for the individual, it seems speech is a key medium for the spiritual-religious process social body. As I saw it, the religious question seemed to boil down to: how and through what do we commune? What is the sacrament or the word of true communion?

This platform for thought emerged after bumping up against and recognizing some of the dangers involved in projecting the individual spirit into the communal spirit:

1. Narcissism: where a false communion is achieved through the absorption/consumption of the other into one's understanding. Even if this succeeds, it fails, as communion with the other is lost precisely as the other disappears into one's totalisation/determination.

2. Nihilism: the project of achieving communion is given up and one slips into despair as it seems impossible to achieve communion with an other, impossible to share a world.

The oscillation between these two poles in my own endeavor to share spirituality gave rise to the religious dimension in my life. This is the shorthand of my rationalisation for my forward movement into the [generative (en)closure of a confessional Christian faith] (https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_15_no_1_alderman_berge_pascal_generative_enclosures.pdf ).

Network, Community, Holy Spirit

(it starts to get a bit looser here, thanks for bearing with me)

Holy Spirit for S.Zizek is something like an Intersubjectivity that is not dependent on a Big Other. Death of God Theology is that theology appropriate to the successive phases of mourning the death of God and all his big and little substitutes. Dying to outdated and ‘out-moded’ transcendental guarantees and authorities opens the subject onto an abyss of freedom. The ‘radical Christian’ sees this very God of the Beyond with its mediation of your life here by the assurance of some benefit hereafter as being what dies on the cross. The catch for the Christian who would shy away from this precipice for the comfort of how they had previously configured the transcendent until that point, is that their shying away might preclude them from participation in Holy Spirit today as a kind of emergent network dynamic of intersubjectivity not dependent on or mediated by a big other, their threats or their assurances.

The network is this dynamic of intersubjectivity that is not totally subjected to community or institutional structures and the figures that centre them. The network exists as a kind of community of communities but not as another super-structure but as the in-between mediating function, the [metaxi-modal]

DMT Rafiki Sage LARP-ing Xagick

(remember, its getting looser)

At the beginning of the year, I was thinking about this kind of subject, the sacred subjectivity that we are seeing the advent of, in Vervaekean terms, that fulfills this role of being between, this is the subjectivity of the network.

My concoction at the time in endeavoring to think this: Dramaturgical Metamodern Theurgy (DMT) Sage LARP-ing. Where the social function of sageliness is encouraged and enacted by willing and able participants who can escape the third-person meta-emphasis of our cultural tendencies so that they can enter into a first person sincere sageliness encounterable on the street. The primary, un-contrivable skill is a kind of Timing. Consider when and how Rafiki enters the story line in the Lion King movies. Or, and more to the sage as vanishing mediator or necessary function, Rafiki in the Lion King 1½ spin-off on Timon: Rafiki exemplifies this perfect arc of the sage as a vanishing mediator where it is simply his presence toward the end of the movie that induces Timon to act out his own internalization of Rafiki/sage. The simple timing of Rafiki’s presence breaks Timon’s rut and induces him to host his own dialog with himself and his internal sage such that the need for an more active part on Rafiki’s side is nullified and he says, "my work is done here."

Timon Imitates Rafiki - The Lion King 1 1/2

At the beginning of the year I was attempting to map and articulate this emerging sage-like subjectivity in its function of effectively and pragmatically mediating the signifiers and gestures of no-thing in the social body. The subject who is a present-absence in the social body in the same way that ‘nothing’ is a present absence in the sentence. I sought the Holey!

What follows is some of the non-sense that I gathered in doing so:

- The importance of the uncontrivable gestural and timing of a sage (this is the dramaturgical dimension which is ‘proto-shamanic’ and not quite theatrical in a modern sense). The ‘theurgical’ in DMT gestures to the theological dimension of the dramaturgy).

• The sage is concerned with the pragmatics of no-thingness signifiers in speech and gesture.

• The being of no-thing, the no-thing of being, the [(being-nothing) becoming]¹, and so on.

• The tantric necessity for contact with a living master in terms of the highest spiritual transmission. A master as one, flesh and blood, capable of returning you to yourself as realized no-thing becoming; the impossible subject, the present-absence, the ‘nothing’ that is there.

• Sage as someone who speaks and acts from a realised nothingness, the non-experience experiencer, the person whose being nothing is becoming.

• and so on through the void

• (it is funny that this non-sense has received bullet point expression, did I say anything?)

This assumption of the requirement for a living master was shaken in encountering 'Jesus'. Jesus as that re-occurring present-absence whose spiritual achievement is this vanishing-mediating-sage-function. The one who is here and is not and who leaves to us his speech with the other mediated body that we can pour into and in so pouring realise the perfection of identity in its self-giving-ness.

It is here in this relational space of speech and its pragmatic implicature that the pragmatic of no-thingness become the priestly duty of implicature maintenance and gardening. In the community of believers Christ’s Body is the pragmatic implication, and the context conveyance of the speech act and the invitation to the other of the no-place in which they might find rest. Through this kenosis, one becoming what one is: empty and Christologically-repossessed.

(From DMT Rafiki Sage Larping Xagick to Jesus makes for a fun and incomplete testimony.)

Pragmatics of Nothingness and the End of Strategy

(believe it or not it gets even looser, thanks for hanging on!)

Placing something un-placeable in our speech, being something impossible in our relationships, being human, being real.

Some of the flare-ups in the writing above is inspired by the theory below

[Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis] (audio) (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356277938_Dialectic_into_Dialogos_and_the_Pragmatics_of_No-thingness_in_a_Time_of_Crisis )

Some resources above.

Jordan Hall's critique of metamodernism in the context of faith is something like: Faith is realised in the 1st person not the 3rd person. Metamodernism exhibits a 3rd person preference in the context of ‘thinking’ faith and so, not leaving the meta-position, does not realise faith in its actuality as 1st person grounded. Such a subject, it goes, does not enact faith from within. That is, does not consider himself part of this enough to utter from its interiority.

Ok, I want to complete and release this, (here’s to new habits of completion at any cost in 2025!) so ill bullet point the rest, both cool quotes and thinking points. Maybe this is now or just has been remixticism(?), an impromptu-unintended liturgy of lack!

• "The gospel is a lion, it need not be defended, only set free" (Spurgeon)

• Thanks to Philosophy Portal I got to ask Slavoj Zizek a question.

My question was perhaps painfully simple, but for me captures the heart at the tensions of my symbolic identities:

In terms of advancing a global emancipatory politic (through Christian Atheism*) are we in solidarity with the church as they endeavor to reach the 2 billion or so people who have not heard the Gospel?

• "The structural determination of the concept moves from historical contingency into logical necessity" (Cadell Last paraphrased)

• Take the contingency of Christ and the historical momentum of his name as cause for standing behind the Christian advantage as:

"The truth of Religion is Christianity and the truth of Christianity is Atheism"

• Can you tell a Noble Lie? Could you eat it?

• "The non-duped err" And “when we think we have escaped from ideology we are most trapped in it"

• What are the socially mediated, historically heavy, potentially eschatological signifiers of luminous nothingness near you?

By Kirsty Rosenstock

Interfacing Church and World

Here are some excessively practical and imprecise co-ordinates that I use and intend to develop at this intersection of church and world. They are intended to be played with more than analyzed.

John 7:38 , "He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water"

As a believer you are taught to expect God to fulfill his promise and to check yourself against his word. In the context of practical encounters in the real of church life and with people in the market, the following formula/provocation can be used:

1. Can you utter the name Jesus appropriately without complication? Amongst any other person/group?

2. Are rivers of living water flowing from your belly?

The playful dimension of this, or its complication, is that this is specifically not a private endeavor. The process of finding right utterance is mediated by the other to whom, with whom, or in the context of whom you come to utterance. The caveman-like playground heuristic is: if this signifier finds complication on the tongue it indicates a cultural inheritance that will interrupt or bracket one's development if not mediated and metabolized.

In no to number (1) try consider the specificity and historical momentum of this exact signifier as a gift rather than a curse. The work is to undo for one's self the way in which the name is cursed in your social use of it. The cost of this is that this necessarily unfolds in the dimension of the words use or utterance which is with others. And so, the quest for its mediation and ‘correct’ utterance plays out within the context of one's social relationships and those social relationship are constituted by real others. This is all to say, using it can lead to being severely misunderstood which introduces its own set of problems plagued by the pain of being mistaken. There is also the danger that your own use of this signifier may lead to your total perversion and capture in stagnant currencies of the word.

Number (2) is aimed more at self-identified Christians who cannot directly relate to 'living waters flowing from their belly'. If such a line strikes you as in some way abstract then there is embodied work that might facilitate you as a self-identified Christian in your faith walk and contribute to the realization in your life of the promise in John 7:38.

I attempted to articulate this mediation unsuccessfully on the live stream below

This was to a context that seems to be uncomplicated in their utterance but seem to inherit complexities as faith relates to the body and physical praxis.

My hypothesis is that 'new-age-woo-embodiment-stuff' has value to feed into the church in the context of (2), where church has value to feed into new-age-woo-embodiment-stuff in the context of (1).

In terms of unravelling this cultural inheritance of Christianity. It is not as simple as identifying as Christian, in fact there are real perverted dangers in doing so.

Here's some other material at that church-woo interface. I jumped onto this stream in the hopes to talk about what Mark D Parker was imagining in terms of OnlyFans Ministry, it is a thought that I have wrestled with as I straddle this para-institutional gap of the network [House of Woo stream]

My Local Church and its Elders

I entered a process of minor conflict and mediation with my church elders on a related issue in the year. They deemed my interest in certain contexts of meditative practice to be unchristian and in the domain of the enemy.

We landed upon a highly workable paradox/contradiction that plays out between The Bible and its Interpretation(s):

The elders and I communed through the same word, the same bible, and yet that same bible meant confirmation in a certain direction for me that they could not understand and that felt for them to be in contradiction with the word. Since we were communing through the same word, the problem and difference must then arise from the interpretation(s) at play rather than the word itself. And unless one party was going to be ridiculous and claim possession of the correct interpretation, we had to confront the contradiction. The contradiction did some work in the relationships between us but ultimately in an unsatisfactory manner meaning whatever was repressed in that process will recur between us in the future.

Below are some of the interwoven shadow dimensions that emerged between us:

1. The use of the implicit to condemn and shape behavior (Here’s where we see the importance of the pragmatics of nothingness in its concern for the implicature of speech):

A condemning, vague, implicature proliferates in contexts where interpretation is mistaken for the truth of the word. Here the difference/contradiction in direction of those who commune through the same word is opportunity for reflecting on the shadow material, an opportunity to liberate relationship from the disembodied voices of condemnation that dwell in the implicature of speech.

When such invitations are not mediated/taken, the community of belief starts to re-subject itself to the disembodied condemning voices. This tends to play out, and most thoroughly tempts the believer, in the power to imply inclusion and exclusion. When the believer realizes they are subject to and suffer the same power that they at times enjoy over the other whom they might confirm or deny, they can then enter the shadow work more sincerely.

It is precisely such enacted difference/contradiction that begins to break the deadlock of preferred interpretations, in which those lurking disembodied voices of condemnation dwell, and liberate communion through fidelity to a living word. This is part of the necessity of moving from within the faith for the radical/metta-modern Christian. The precedent of course is Jesus the good shepherd who enters by the gate and calls his sheep by name. Such is the gesture that fulfills the law, with love, by first submitting to the law.

I have said way too much in way too little, please forgive me. What I just gestured to I am tracking diligently, it is a long process. I tend to think it through the term

Metta-modern Christianity

The double T in metta is to remember the basic requirement of moving from a posture of loving kindness when moving into the kinds of spaces that i’ve intimated and implied. I recently gained the term, Radical Christian from Altizer, and the tradition of Death of God Theology that are enriching my thinking here.

Questions Toward a Christian Atheist Subtle Body and some Hyper-personal Beginnings of the CoW.

Questions Toward Cadell Last's Christian Atheist Subtle Body

Here I host Cadell Last on the CoW and we talk Christian Atheism and the Body through his own process, project and story.

The guys at the House of Woo teased a testimony out of me that then commandeered the Grail Country channel (Grail Country hosts the house of Woo ). In the Grail Country Channel I speak to my gathering thoughts on the meaning of radical faith as it pertains to grief, mourning and lamentation.

…

My family itself, being multi-racial and in South Africa, expresses in its structure some of the complexities of the place. There is a sense in my family life of some kind of wider relevance or context, I think as there should be in any family. For now I can only begin to acknowledge the way that I myself and this project are shaped by the context in which it arises and is being worked on. Ultimately, I desire for the project to have relevance to that context though I do not know what that will look like.

The first time I looked at a span of time ahead of me that was not committed to an institution and that did not have an end date, I was launched into what was essentially a prolonged altered state whereby I undertook a kind of ancestral work. This did not end in initiating within a local tradition but it fundamentally shaped my enactment by the insistence of a logic of inclusion. This in general surfaces another dimension and intention of the holey cow, the cow was also conceived as a means to get familiar with the spiritualities and cultures of wisdom in my immediate context. The guiding understanding being: living cultures are nurtured by a living wisdom that they gather under.

This is the tantric/philosophical dimension of the project’s self understanding. I quickly noticed a kind of incompleteness, a ‘holey-ness’ to the cultures and bodies I moved through, and so started to track phenomena and its associated skill sets, this metaxi-modality, of following the through line of different domains, of different cultures of wisdom and worship. This process led me to the body of Christ, where the decision made at that juncture, saying the yes that can never be compelled, marked a clear break from a prior mode of outsourcing responsibility for being a locus of decision to ‘external forces’ and ancestry.

…

Below, [Rite of Spring: An Apocalyptarian Puja ], is me at a point in my process when as would be said in my local context, 'I was very sick' (with a calling).

Along the way in seeking out the cultures of wisdom in my local context, I met Q7 who called some healers together earlier this year in this exchange [Healer to Healer Exchange hosted by Q7 and IYX Africa ]

From Ancestors to great Ancestor Jesus

This ancestor-Jesus dynamic is one of the very real tensions that plays out in the spiritual lives of people in my context. The dynamic I am gesturing to has a deep history and probably some resonance with the indigenous encounters with missionary bodies around the world.

This will need to be a skillfully integrated aspect of the work that follows here on the cow where we can point to local symbolism of the Cow as a ‘bridge between worlds’. The thing worth noting for the posterity of this post along with its secondary function of compilation is the way that the ‘historical reality’ (broadly conceived) of Jesus offers to us a Great Ancestor whom might liberate us from our blood bonds and the cycles of vengeance and revenge that can often plague ancestral work. This another positive dimension of Christianity as a faith of adoption.

…

At the funeral of my Godfather who was murdered on his farm, I acted out in a particular way that caused my uncle to ask me to examine the spirits that I had been involved in (the ancestral, psychedelic, etc). He asked that I pray for guidance as to whether they were of God, as it is expressed.

He asked me to read Watchman Nee's Spiritual Man, which I did, and which did significant work on me over the course of a year, finishing it around the time I was baptized.

In a dream a had around this time I was in a congregation of a teacher that I had previously recognized as a spiritual master/authority and whom I desired to be with since tantra requires such contact with a living spiritual master. There was a figure behind me in the dream and to my right who said I was 'saved'. This teacher, Igor Kufayev, bowed to figure behind me and I was released from the congregation. Over the next few days I was flooded with gratitude for Igor Kufayev and his teaching as I began to realize how far it had carried me. Specifically in how he had grounded me in a trinitarian conception of reality/experience.

This is included to say that my own deliverance has been one characterized far more by the preposition into than from.

Personal Reflection

It is sometimes exceedingly embarrassing to be alive. In this new network-tech environment we can now immortalize all our embarrassing moments along the way. Reflecting on this manner of exposure is I think important the more that the sometimes messy process of our spiritual growth is mediated by a recorded network dynamic. I should expect and allow myself to continue to show up in ways that are changing, complexifying and revealing to myself the performative contradictions, tragic ironies, and cringe-commitments of my past. Standing where I am now, editing this messy piece, I am glad for all the ways that I have leaned in to and exposed myself to online communities and networks. I am grateful for the growth opportunities that I have been given and have taken.

I take myself to be participating in something like an emergent networked techno-digital-wisdom-commons. I hope to feed into it information from my local enactment and to link people from my local context into its network. Thank you for joining me here in this, a blessed 2025 to us!

Thank you for bearing the increasing disorder of this post.

1. Cadell Last Newsletter