Put another way, whenever you are looking at a thought or a feeling, you are looking at a wall. You create the door yourself.
I think there is some truth in this comment. What lies behind that truth, though? Ah, maybe I will ponder that tonight.
What I also felt was how easy it is to LOSE all of that. It comes along, like a tide, it lasts for a moment or two–longer if you are one of perhaps 3 dozen people in a nation of 350 million people–then it fades away. You become someone who USED to be famous. The feeling fades, and you seek to get it back.
What I felt was how precarious all that is. No wonder so many stars are so messed up. You have to be a little insane to have a drive to be famous in the first place, and then getting close, or achieving it, and losing it, must be horrible. Hollywood is filled with people who had a moment in the sun, then it was gone. They wait every day for their agents to call, but they never do, or it is terrible stuff. And the women: they get older. Those parts go to about 10 women in this country.
And I was listening to the Nirvana song an hour ago, that ends with them droning over and over “all alone is all we are”, and I got to thinking–and I think I’ve commented on this before–that being a “rock star” is obviously overrated too, for most of them. Maybe Gene Simmons has it figured out. But most of them are a bit insane, and so many of them die young. I went through Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell and the singer for Linkin Park in 3 seconds. Then Jim Morrison, Jimmie Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Nick Drake. Even Elvis belongs on this list.
Actually here is a long list, for just the 1970’s, nearly all of them premature. Even the heart attacks can in most cases be ascribed to unhealthy habits deriving from unhappiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_in_rock_and_roll_(1970s)
What can you hold on to? What lasts? What is reliable? These are very Buddhist questions. Rock and roll is not the answer: it is just a complex addiction, in itself.
Might there be no higher moral command than that we take pleasure in the company of one another, in our work, and in small things, all in harmony, all in the present moment?
There is no requirement which stipulates that the universe be benign in any way. Indeed, large masses of those among us have concluded it is cold, infinite, and indifferent entirely and that all traces of our personal existence will be gone in the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking, no matter what we do. This seems to me a completely unnecessary conclusion–one not supported by the evidence–but I am playing with ideas here.
What might it mean to escape Samsara?
I had these powers in a dream last night.
And I was left to wonder several things. First, would we all necessarily be happier if evil were gone from the world? Does it perhaps not serve some useful purpose? Is it perhaps a base form of an energy without which life would have no savor and joy, and thus something which needs to be transmuted, not destroyed? I think this is the case.
And if you could have anything, might you not just find it easier and more interesting to see where the chips fall, and accept the outcome? This is perhaps a harder question to answer than you might suppose.
Recognizing this opens up a new box of tools, and unsuspected capabilities.
“We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Here is what I would submit: what is actually being admitted, for those for whom this system works, is that the addiction cannot solve the actual problem, that no amount of alcohol is sufficient to heal the wound, that the behavior is intrinsically futile, and must lead to death if taken to the logical extreme.
I read an excerpt from the writing of William R. Burroughs perhaps six months ago, and saw something which resonated with me, but which I think I have not posted before now.
After traveling to Colombia to find and take a drug called Yage, which seems to have been a species of Ayahuasca, but with perhaps a slightly different recipe than used mostly now, he succeeds, and writes the following:
I sat there waiting for results and almost immediately had the impulse to say “that wasn’t enough. I need more.” I have noticed this inexplicable impulse on the two occasions when I got an overdose of junk. Both times before the shot took effect I said “This wasn’t enough. I need more.”
Roy told me about a man who came out of jail clean and nearly died in Roy’s room. “He took the shot and right away said, ‘that wasn’t enough’ and fell on his face out cold. I dragged him out into the hall and called an ambulance. He lived.”
As you might imagine, given the setup, what follows reads like it was profoundly unpleasant.
Why would someone not say “that wasn’t enough” when it is the right amount, but say “that wasn’t enough” when it is too much? My take is that some part of them wants to die. The only real solution with drugs is death. That is the end state where the pain actually stops permanently, at least in this reality. Everything else is a compromise. When they say “that wasn’t enough” some part of them is speaking a hidden truth. What they really want is all of it; they want five times what it would take to kill them.
Did you know Keith Moon committed suicide? I had always assumed it was a Janet or Jim or Jimmie style accident, but no, he took 36 or so pills, of which the first 6 killed him, and the rest were found in his system. That was enough for him.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman had enough drugs in his apartment to kill himself many times over. Looking it up, he was found with the syringe still in his arm, and a mixture of heroin, cocaine, benzodiazapenes (tranquilizers), and methamphetamine in his system. He had enough, by William R. Burroughs standard.
Dealing with addiction directly is recognizing that palliatives cannot heal you, and they cannot even really palliate you. They help you forget for a time: that is all. When you wake up, you are still you, and you still hurt in all the familiar ways, plus the contributions of the hangover, social alienation, and/or whatever else attends your particular method of avoiding dealing with your injury.
This is the cold truth. It is also the only way out. There are many, many tools which can help this journey, but this fact must be recognized.
For me, seeing this much has already required a lot of progress. Many if not most people like me never see that far, I don’t think. The pain makes clear sight impossible, not least because an important part of dealing with the pain is denying it even exists.
You know: I’m fine. It’s all good. I feel fine. I just like to have a drink or two here and there. I’m basically happy. Why wouldn’t I be? I have everything I need, a good job, a good wife, good kids. Everything is fine, perfectly OK. Just need a few here and there to calm me down.
It is like living in the rain, and denying you are wet. I get all this. It is all emotionally logical. And it is not the consequence of emotional weakness. It is being taken over by survival circuits which do everything they can to get you as long a life as possible, without having a fucking clue how to fix the underlying malfunction. Everything is autopilot, on some level, even when it feels like choice.
Becoming free–or as free as we can get in this world, in these bodies–is a very difficult task, one which is accomplished by very few people.
According to his biography here, Gary Gygax, who more or less invented–or at least co-invented–Dungeons and Dragons, was a Republican poll monitor in the 1960 election, where he witnessed numerous “irregularities” that we can assume to be cheating, by Democrats. He was offered–it does not say by whom–a scholarship to the University of Chicago, if he would keep his mouth shut. He did not report the violations, but neither did he accept the scholarship.
It has long been alleged that Daley may well have thrown the national election by cheating in Chicago, which gave Kennedy Illinois.
It’s interesting to speculate how history would be different, if Nixon had won. We certainly would not have had Johnson, and it’s unlikely that, if we had had “Vietnam”, that it would have played out incrementally, slowly, and at such high cost under Nixon. Nixon did, I will remind you, win the Vietnam War, with General Creighton Abrams. That victory was then crushed in the dirt and abandoned by Democrats who, for all intents and purposes, were the enthusiastic lackeys of the Communist dictators, invaders, tyrants, and sadists.
Put another way, if you cannot look forward to today, you cannot look forward to tomorrow.
Put another way, the past clings, and until you can rid yourself of it, it will make you heavier and slow you down.
And if I might contradict myself (I might, in the event), if you do not know where you come from, it is impossible to know where you are beginning, when you decide where you should go.
I would actually unite these by saying that knowing who you are is really the outcome of processing the past. It allows you to begin where you are, rather than where you wish you were, or mistakenly believe you are.
All of us, I think, simultaneously overestimate and underestimate what is possible for us. Although I hate to quote him, I think Bill Gates captured this reasonably well by noting that most of us overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year, and seriously underestimate what we can do in a lifetime, with focus, and with a plan.
But practically, for many of us, there is this whole sequence of largely unconscious emotional events which happen every morning on rising which color everything. They limit what we can see, and they do so every day of our lives, until they are dealt with. Dealing with these events is learning to begin to live consciously, and until we do that, all of us are boats on the sea without sails or rudders. I made this sound like a good thing a few days ago, and it is, but on a much higher level. In the end, none of us is really fully in control. We never know for sure what may unexpectedly burst into our lives. But this does not mean we cannot engineer and support regularities which are meaningful and healthy.