Surviving versus Thriving

I have not been able to bring myself to watch “Unbroken”.  I KNOW, from personal experience, that there is a huge difference between surviving and thriving.  When you push your will to the utmost, with the fury and passion that terror and fear of death–and sheer stubbornness–compel, there is a cost.  There is a price to pay.  A debt is incurred, that is paid with sleepless nights, tossing and turning, nightmares, panic attacks, hypervigilance, inability to trust people, and the depression and sadness that these symptoms bring in their wake.  That was the aftermath of Zamperini’s war time experience. In my limited understanding, it was only when he embraced Christianity that he found peace.

Nietszche’s famous dictum notwithstanding, he wound up very much alive in an insane asylum.

I can’t embrace Christianity, and I don’t think most “moderns”, as I could call people like me, can either.  I wish I could, but I can’t.  It remains my personal belief that whatever Christ’s actual message was, it has been perverted through some combination of carelessness, avarice, and stupidity.

My dream is of methods which CONSISTENTLY, reliably, resolve trauma.  Our processes and procedures, our understandings, are those of infants.  Ancient civilizations, I think, were vastly superior to us in that respect.

One interesting thing I will note is that I have reached a point in my Kum Nye where after half an hour or so of doing the exercises, I very much feel I am in a cloud–that I sort of AM a cloud, or a field, of energy.  And in my current set of exercises we are reaching a culmination of sorts, where I invoke this cloud, and then bring past traumas and negative experiences into it, and they are transformed.  The ideal–and this is a realistic ideal, I think, based on my early experience of it–is to take all experiences of all sorts and instantly transform them into positive, even ecstatic energy.

There is a method to this.  I have been doing this practice 2-6 times a week now for about a year and a half.  It has taken this long to get to this point.  And of course I have been doing a lot of other inner work as well.

But I will reiterate my vision that things like this belong in temples at the very CENTER of our culture, which are not peripheral, but part of the sustaining core of what brings and keeps us together.

What a fallen, ugly lot we are.  Even in Christian churches, which speak–often but not invariably–honestly of love, they still retain a human sacrifice at the very center of it, and a vengeful, violent God.

And Christianity, and all other religions in America and the West generally, is in decline. Those outside of it have NOTHING but their politics, their work, maybe their families, and hedonism to replace it, all of them too ugly to be the focus of a good life.

We need more.  We deserve more, I think.  Certainly we need to demand more of ourselves.  We need to take the next step.  I am speaking to the wind again, but at the moment I need to.