Killing

It is interesting to ponder the fact that most modern Americans have never killed anything larger than a spider.  They do not share the experience of Americans 100 years ago, when more people lived on farms than not, and where wringing a chickens neck–or cutting its head off–or slaughtering and butchering a pig were ordinary events.  I don’t know the statistics, but it seems likely that hunting and fishing are largely confined to rural communities, although I do know a number of people around here who do both.

Killing feeds the gut energy I keep obsessing about.  It brings, I think (and I am my own statistic: I’ve killed a few fish, but many years ago, and that’s it), a connection with the serious side of life.  Do flippant people cut pigs into pieces, and make sausage with the intestinal casing?  I don’t think so.  There must be a certain horror to it, which one gets used to.

It is a bad thing, I think, that we have outsourced all our killing to professionals.  There is a meat packing plant–a slaughterhouse–I drive by sometimes, and see the people who work there outside, smoking, with their protective hair nets on, and I wonder if they dream of knives and chainsaws and blood. I suspect many do.   It is too much.  This is far beyond going out back to grab a chicken for supper.

And I have been pondering the ways that we engineer horror in some amount into our ordinary lives.  Immediately, I thought of the Tibetan Sky Burials.  This video shows it quite graphically: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=666_1414847845

It is described here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/cultural-traditions/sky-burial.htm

It is not uncommon for serial killers to dismember the bodies of those they kill.  Here, it is done to the bodies of loved ones.  And they don’t stop at dismembering: they flay the skin from bone, and crush the bones.

By all accounts, Tibetans are calm, cheerful, peaceful people–or were until the bastards from China colonized them to build a larger neo-Capitalist Empire.

But they do this.  Tantric practices include drinking from cups made of human skulls, and keeping human bones as relics.

Horror, accepted, internalized, grants peace.  This is perhaps the solution to the puzzle.

Within my Kum Nye practice, they are speaking of our “dark side”–which seemingly needed Jung to point it out, since we were quite content to identify fully with the parts we like about ourselves–as holding.  It is held energy, unreleased energy.  Released, it is no longer dark.  The task is to carefully, painstakingly, search out these areas, and grant them water.

And me being me, and getting obsessed from time to time with things, it occurs to me that the precise function of the unmyelinated vagus nerve is suppression, down-regulation, holding. Taken to its full extreme, it will pull you out of your body entirely, with many people reporting, in the moments before they think they will die, something like an out of body experience.  Short of that, it will paralyze you.  It is a primitive survival circuit.  It is like being taken over by some primitive creature which has somehow survived within us.

I will wonder aloud if some technology can be invented for measuring tension in this circuit, which would allow some sort of biofeedback to be developed to release it.  I know that Heartrate Variability is related to vagus nerve function, but I think it is the myelinated one.  I will admit ignorance on this.