And when you look at people, their minds are all over the place. You can be addicted to the past. You can be addicted to sports.
Here is a metric: what, if taken from you, would give you a nervous tick, would make you anxious, would make you think about it all the time?
What is your blankie, of the sort Linus carried? I suppose we all have them, and probably are safest emotionally when we have a number of them: hobbies, passions, go-to activities and thoughts.
Most of human civilization represents long efforts to bring order to the world, to make regular and predictable not just food and shelter and peace and social connection, but how you should understand the world and your place in it, which is made easier when everyone around is saying and doing the same things.
In this respect, difference feels like an assault. You have been given a choice, where there was none. It is an intrusion of chaos into the sane, normal and known. You resent the person who is different to the precise extent you lack faith in who you are, as a person, and as the group to which you belong (if any).
I suppose if everyone counts as different–as in the case of extreme social alienation–then all of them are attacking you with their very being. In the Joker–which I still haven’t seen, but vaguely feel like I ought to see, since it seems to have tapped an important vein in our collective lives, to the extent that as I predicted we are already seeing protesters breaking things in clown-face, as I recently saw in Chile–he could have been made violent without any assault on him at all. I don’t think most school shooters are physically beaten up, although most are likely verbally mocked, underscoring their alienated status.
The life of mankind has been long, and many, many solutions have been formed. I read some 86 languages are counted in both Ethiopia and Laos. Laos in particular is not a very large nation. Does it not seem obvious that with every different language come differing customs and beliefs, even if they are only slightly different? And that even within the same linguistic group, the tribe on the other side of the hill may do things differently, and believe slightly different things?
We are at a stage in history where some part of us looks to space. Relative to space, we are a single planet. But we all (or most of us: some of us have none) have a home, a bed, specific sheets we put on the bed, a nightime routine, loved or hated or tolerated others, and things specific to us.
Then we wake up and go out in the street, and meet we never know who. In most large cities, you will see people you don’t know all day long. You see them at the grocery store–where if you are lucky, or live in a small town, you may sometimes run into people you know. You see them driving. You see them at Home Depot. Always different people, although many employees remain the same.
This is a hard way to live, for most of us at least. I think most of us would be happiest being born somewhere small, and living there most of our lives. Yes, perhaps everyone needs to spend a few years roaming around. Maybe that could become a new normal, in lieu of college. Roaming around makes you appreciate home more. You get that restless energy out. And you always have the internet. But you return home, where your family is, where you have uncles and aunts and cousins and of course parents and grandparents. All of them are there, to welcome your own children, who in their turn are made to feel whole, secure, and welcome themselves.
I tend to think the country folks in this country are, by and large, the sane ones. Many if not most of them are likely small minded, but that is not a bad thing in small places. They understand the value of place, something which is forgotten on the national scene, in the big cities, in our metropolises.
Aristotle, I think it was, said a polis should be about the amount of land where everyone could hear a single loud voice calling from a tall place. No more than 10,000 or so, and if you think about it, knowing 10,000 is itself damn near impossible. People, people, everywhere, even in small places.
But if you lose your family, as I have, voluntarily, since they make me emotionally unwell, then this world is a large place. Still, I have my physical place, my bed, my kitchen, my habits.
Within Kum Nye practice, your goal is to develop a home in your feelings, to develop an innate calm which you take with you everywhere. Home, really, IS a feeling. It is that place where you feel warm, safe, wanted, accepted. If you can cultivate those feelings towards yourself, with no external validation, then your home is wherever you lay your hat. And this state, in itself, is a powerful resource against Duhkha. I personally think Tarthang Tulku has shared, in Kum Nye, some of the most powerful teachings Tibetan Buddhism has to offer. They are perhaps only introductory–there is, I think, vastly more. But for most people, and particularly most Americans, that practice alone will get them on the right path. Nothing else is needed. The spiritual IS emotional. This is something I think many of the thrill and high seeking hippies failed then and fail now to grasp.
Be all that as it may, finding your home in your own feelings may sound scary, but only because you (and I) have not yet built that nest of feelings, that warm place where we always feel welcome, and where everything that happens is a source of wonder, growth, and not infrequently delight; where there is nothing to fear, including pain, fear itself, and death.
Few thoughts. I think I have finally myself reached the depths of my own experience. I am finding that you have to–and this is a Bon Mot, by the way, shared with you free of charge, and with a bit of a giggle at my own nerdiness and strangeness–Stay with what you can’t leave behind, until you CAN leave it behind.
That’s my own, although of course I am aware of the U2 album, which has some great songs on it.
Two nights ago, I got to the bottom of the ocean. There was a giant, a monster, which I could not beat, which defeated me completely, which subjugated me and made me its bitch. This feeling is at the root of my own experience. The monster was certainly in part my mother, but probably the totality of my life and what I was feeling at the time. My home was cold, and we moved around so I lost my friends. I could do wrong, but seemingly no right, and from the earliest age. I was first spanked before I was yet a year old.
I checked out, covered up that layer, and created in effect a fake persona to perpetuate the lie, and protect myself from it, and learn how to protect myself from the predations of others, while some part of me never forgot that I lost the first battle of my life, decisively and finally.
And I realize that that monster is not something I can ever defeat, since now it is in me. It IS me. It is the AllFear, the fear without cause, without clear beginning, which never leaves. You cannot defeat one part of yourself with another. You are a system, and all parts are needed. It is all a fabric.
This is the thing, though: the monster represents a wrinkle, a knot, an eddy, a dam, a constriction. It is not a thing in itself, but a symbol of constricted/restricted energy. It is “defeated” by going into that energy, and living there until the water begins moving again.
And I see this is the way to heal trauma, deeply. It is at least a one, and more usually a two stage process. As I have said before, you have two sets of perceptual nexuses: you have the thought/feeling nexus, and then the redemptive, resolutional sensation/image nexus.
Most “meditation” is to my mind incompetent, because it doesn’t make this fact obvious and explicit. You sit there and try not to think, and “return to the breath” in most iterations. Maybe you are feeling the breath, or counting the breaths, or chanting a mantra, or focusing only on the out-breath (which triggers the parasympathetic nervous system) but there is no following. You have to follow. When you sit quietly, your inner recesses will SPEAK to you, and if you don’t listen, you will never get much smarter.
In its essence, Kum Nye is evoking–which is what all the exercises do–listening, then following, then dwelling, then eventually expanding and releasing. It is a process of consciously becoming who you already are, but which you don’t know, because what you think is you is a tangle of knots which need to be released. This could certainly be seen as one meaning of Anatman, although I am quite sure it goes much deeper.
But for many of us, this stage is quite impossible to approach directly. Where trauma is present–and if we add in Developmental Trauma, I think it is present in at least a numerical majority of Americans, which is what makes us so habitually driven to overwork and then narcotize ourselves, most commonly with TV and binge consumption of all sorts–it triggers the circuit breakers and you say something like “this meditation is making me anxious. I feel much worse”.
So I think for most people you need some means of dialing down the background fear and noise. For me, Neurofeedback seems to be doing the trick, although it has taken me a while to figure out a protocol which works for me. I think that field, which in itself should be seen as emerging and developing, has been tainted by the “need for expertise”. I think it has been overcomplicated by people with degrees, who want to be seen as working some form of magic. I think it can be simplified in specific ways I will describe in more detail once 1) I feel like my own work is done; and 2) I have worked successfully with others. My own view is that any work I might do with others will be strengthened and made vastly more effective if I can offer myself as an example of what is possible. A large problem most therapists have is that most of them suffer from most of the same problems their patients do. How can you credibly claim to be able to cure someone else of something you can’t cure yourself of? This large contradiction is at the heart of nearly all ineffective “mental health” practice.
But Neurofeedback is not the only option. Yoga might work. Perhaps swimming or running. Floating is good. I do that too. I think I had a moment of Samadhi last week. I didn’t know I was in it, when I was in it, then I woke up. And it was a bit disconcerting, but I also felt like something had released, that it was healthy and good for me. So I’ll keep showing up, and keep doing my best to keep the faith and keep my courage up.
I think learning to accept solitude constitutes accepting learning to live with it. I am finding that for myself, sometimes literally just sitting there, like a bump on a log, not listening to music, not meditating, not even smoking, just going into the feelings, or really just letting them know I know they are there, and that I’m not running away, seems therapeutic. Sometimes you are doing a lot when you are doing nothing at all.
And I think focusing on all this is important. I am always running away. I’ve always been running away. The feelings are absolutely terrifying. It is the feeling of being ground into a pulp by an infinitely more powerful being. But they are getting smaller.
Life expands from the center. And until you get to the center, you are really just going in circles. Inner work is the key to outer work. I want to plant my feet firmly in the middle and learn to live there. This is my goal.
And I have moments of panic, where I wonder what I am doing with my life. I am much too smart to have accomplished as little as I have. But I started my life more than a little insane. Becoming sane is really the best use of my time there could be, much better than creating world class art, or becoming a faculty member at an elite university, or anything else I can think of. Because who you are is what really matters in the end.
To complete U2–and I saw the title as a clear reference to death–who you are is all that you can’t leave behind. Life is a time to work on that. This is my belief, in any event.
Edit: thinking about it, the fact that I am writing this means I was not broken. I have just been hiding until it was safe to come out. Being truly broken is becoming someone like Hillary or Bill Clinton. There is nothing left there, no residual capacity for deep introspection, much less empathy. Their lives are moving objects around for their own personal benefit.