Yesterday I was contemplating how I fear relaxation, and feeling that this is a general problem. We stay busy because the notion of spending an afternoon on a porch watching the grass grow is anathema, scary. Why?
Within Kum Nye there are three levels of relaxation. The first is what you get with a good massage, as one possibility. But underneath this is Kun Zhi, which is that swirling torrent of unresolved emotions, everything running wild, and which you run from daily. It is all of your truths, your real truths. It is the ugly, but also the possibility of the beautiful. It is the temporarily painful, but also the germ of perennial happiness. It is all mixed together.
Within this mix is the feeling I think most of us have had, and certainly those of us who did not get “good enough” parenting, as psychologists put it, which is that life has no point. Living is useless. “Life is just to die”, as Lou Reed put it.
This feeling came on me strongly yesterday, and it felt familiar. Part of growing is remembering who we once were, and who we have always been, but not consciously.
This pessimism is corrosive, obviously, and especially in precocious children of the sort I once was. What is the superficial antidote? Burying the idea, and countering it with, in my case, a felt need to save the world. I want to save the world precisely because I have not known how to save myself. I feel there are many like me, and as a group we likely do much more harm than good.
Positive thinking manias are rooted in core pessimism. Positive thinking as a practice in high achieving people is of course useful. As an ideology, it is not.
I continue to be surprised by myself. Every day is a unpredictable adventure. Often it is scary, but I have known true horror, and I kept going. Slowly things are coming into place. Soon I will be good, I feel, and happy, after a long, long nightmare.
Edit: I meant to add that the statement “Life has no purpose” is silly to me. Life, per se, is an abstraction, a verbal reification of our experience, itself amenable to the process of decision, of which defining any number of purposes is a primary process. We can give any purpose to life we choose, and if we do t choose that is not “Life’s ” fault.
Practically, psychologically honestly speaking, this a FEELING of disconnection from wholes, from belonging to some process and some people. The thought arises naturally from a primitive but real and honest feeling.
Kum Nye, to me, is the emotional equivalent to reasoning. It is learning about chains of logical emotive causation at the level of primary experience. It is seeing how human emotional life is constituted for oneself, versus the abstractions one finds in books which, if they accurate, can only themselves have come from this process of inner work.
Self evidently, logical answers to emotional questions are found in the emotions. The words you say to yourself, or to anyone else for that matter, don’t matter one damn bit.
I try to say things which mean something. Perhaps sometimes I succeed.