A month or two or three ago it occurred to me that both anger and fear have the ability to create a contraction that feels like something stable. If you find your consciousness is diffuse and wandering–perhaps because you are traumatized and dissociating–then one sure cure is flying into a rage, or doing something that terrifies you. Both provide focus. Both bring you into the present moment, in some respects.
But what they do not do is create STRUCTURE. They are lacking in information. They reject information in fact.
So paradoxically the rage and violence we see in the world, which creates so much disorder, originates in a desire for quick order, for easy order.
This is a deep subject, and it hurts me a bit peering too long into this space, but I will share a couple notes I have made recently.
Sustained order must be built around conscious planning, conscious order creation, conscious goal selection. The goal does not really matter: the planning itself creates order.
And if you think about it, from a psychological perspective this helps add one facet to the complex motivations behind war making. You get rage and violence, and you get large scale coordinated efforts which create order among many people. In this respect, war is perhaps culturally large scale human sacrifice.
On a smaller scale, what do you get when you do an actual animal or human sacrifice? Murder. Death. Blood. But it is murder and death you offer to the Gods. It’s not your fault: they asked for it, right?
But the emotions of this act are cohering for a short time. The scape goat takes on your disorder and venom and unexpressed Shadow. And if you then create social structures we call rituals AROUND the act of violence, you get something which is more or less sustainable. You get small acts of war within the social order that you can integrate, and which lead to greater social cohesion. It is no wonder that most human societies, if you look back far enough, committed acts of ritual murder.
I am reading a book on the Bon religion of Tibet, and it appears there was a period of a few hundred years when it was customary to murder the king and all his advisors when his son reached 13 years of age, or the ability to mount and ride a horse. This is craziness, but history is filled with craziness. People do things that make emotional sense, then create rationalizing structures around them.
Here is another tidbit, from my notes: the logical antidote or opposite counterpart emotionally to myth is state control.
What I mean by this is that myth binds us together in ways which are both comforting and confining. As I was saying to someone the other day, given how intertwined the French Monarchy and the Catholic Church were, atheism was a very rational companion to political rebellion. They went together.
What we want from myths and rituals and public ceremonies and all public culture are a sense of belonging, something to calm us, something to celebrate and be happy about, and something to be proud of. That is a short list.
If you can generate these states WITHOUT an external apparatus, you are much more free.
As I have said, all these myths are contingent on believing the lies your culture tells you. Once you stop believing those lies you will either spin out of control, find another myth (Leftism, as well as much else) or have to learn state control.
To my mind, for the world generally no skill is more important than the ability to relax deeply at will, to drop worries, to loosen your sense of self, your obsession with context and meaning, and to relate openly and directly with the universe as it is.
I have many bad moments. But I have good moments too. And the good moments are VERY, very good. I am not free yet. I have not escaped. But I see light in the darkness.