Hell

It seems to me, based on my limited experience with it, that heaven and pleasure are a process of gathering, of creating a core self which learns to choose affects which are pleasurable, which learns to give and receive/accept love freely, and which is able to grow and expand these feelings.  This is the core process of Kum Nye.  You discharge all the “bad” stuff into the atmosphere (bad, of course, is a value judgement which can, in turn, create further affects which then also need to be dealt with.  If you don’t judge it the first time, you don’t need to deal with it a second and third and fourth time, making non-judgement vastly more efficient), then gather what they call the “cream” of Kum Nye, which is the positive, relaxed, pleasant, connected experience.

The obverse of this is being fragmented into many pieces.  As I grow, paradoxically, I keep dropping back into hell.  What happened to me was extraordinarily unpleasant, and all the affects are still there.  It’s an ocean of feeling, a universe of feeling.  Nothing would have been easier for me to have become an academic or professional of some sort who lived in his head, who dealt–well, since I am intelligent–in the abstract.  My body likely would have protested with illnesses of various sorts (as things stand, I am very healthy.  I never get sick, and have not, yet, suffered any effects at all from all my drinking), but I could have achieved and maintained a relative homeostasis.

But in hell the pain forces you into many places.  If I might use traditional imagery, one part of you is dangling over a pit of fire, another is being drowned, another confined to a small cage, and another eaten over and over by wild beasts.  This does not quite happen simultaneously, or sequentially, but all are true at the same time.  The pain has to be distributed, somehow.  A unitary self cannot face it alone.  This is the principle of dissociation.

Practically, in my understanding–and although I am quite certain my understanding is incomplete, I am not certain the science itself is complete either–dissociation manifests as delta waves.  Parts of you go to sleep, in effect.  We have all seen, I suspect, dreamy people who have been through severe trauma, people who are not quite there/here.

The delta is a sort of fog which covers up the light of clear memory.  But those memories, when theyh hit, hit in many places.  The unitary self cannot endure.  Severe abstraction is one symptom.  Substance use (sic) is another.  Such trauma is always an encircling, with the victim at the center.  If I might be so bold, I think primitive sacrificial rituals come out of a literal reenactment of this primal wound, when carried by many.  They make social and psychological sense.  They pacify, for a time, some discomfort, some terror, in the soul of those present.

As I say, perhaps as a lunatic, perhaps as a genius, perhaps as a misguided fool, I want to write a Gesamptphilosophie.  I want to start what I might call a new religion, based on a very, very deep understanding of the nature of human kind, as combined with the best in neuroscience.  I have suffered a great deal for what understanding (I think) I have won, and will no doubt suffer more.

The thing about suffering, though, and this is the third of three ideas I mentioned some months back, is that when it is done, it is only a distant memory.  When you hold your breath, every second can feel like an eternity at the end, but when you get that breath, all is forgotten.  When you are very hungry, all is forgotten when you sit down to dinner. 

All the anxieties I felt on December 12th, 2017, and 2016, are forgotten.  I can’t begin to say what they were without going back to my blog and diary of that period.

I read, when I was 18 or 19, that Meister Eckhart commented that “nothing is as sweet as having suffered.”  Now, this is not a motto for a masochist.  What he is saying is that it is a fantastic feeling when any misery ends, and a better feeling than a baseline which lacked that suffering. 

People who come to this nation from poor places value it (at least, the immigrants we WANT value it) because they have been in places of mass poverty, and no opportunity with almost any amount of work to get ahead without becoming criminals.

People who have suffered value ordinary days.  People like me who have been tortured every night for many years value a good night’s sleep.  Or at least I think I will.  I think I am close.

But all this is magnificent.  None of this is wasted.  Nothing that happens to you, or that you choose to do, is ever wasted.  The universe conserves information.  Everything can be used to learn.  Nothing is forgotten.  What takes time, though, is learning to remember mainly the good. It’s always there.  It isn’t going anywhere, and no one is hiding it.  We just place it in the shadow in our waking consciousness, or at least some of us less enlightened souls do.

Putting first things first is a hard thing to do.  But as I’ve said before, if I had to pick a one word motto it would be “REMEMBER”.  If I had to pick a second it would be “ENDURE”.

You could build a good life on those two.