I am at a point where I can feel brief bursts of new feelings, but I don’t know how to keep them, to invite them to stay. It is a bit maddening, knowing that who I am I will soon not be, and all at the same time that I am looking around me and realizing that everyone is crazy. I don’t know anyone who can help me with this. I am on my own. Certainly many people have been through this, but I don’t know any that I trust have. It’s a strange thing, setting off to cross a desert.
And it occurs to me that I have both an advantage and a disadvantage in that my time is my own. Most days I can get up when I want, do what I want in the order I want, and go to bed when I want. I have to get certain things done, or the money will stop flowing, but I have wide latitude. It is not uncommon for me not to speak to one person all day. I work out of my home, even though I do in theory have an office I can go in to.
Our jobs are powerful medicine. They help to provide structure and routine, even if most people resent that structure and routine. Cziszentmilhi (I don’t feel like looking it up) found that most people, contrary to their own predictions, were actually happier at work than watching TV. We have just been conditioned to reject work as one of the most basic dignities afforded a free people.
Me, I live in trackless waters, and it confuses me sometimes. I am directly confronted with deep existential realities in my solitude, and, most of the time, silence. It is a sort of meditative retreat, I suppose. I am not alone all the time, but I am alone enough that I feel I can feel currents flowing around me, which would be unseen if I felt I had to talk or listen all the time.
Spirituality, it seems to me, is always at root the feeling of new feelings. Whoever you are, no matter how happy or sad your childhood and life until now, you can go deeper, travel farther. There are states of awareness which have been described many times, which are real, but which cannot be reached through the feelings and emotions you have until now allowed yourself. You must go somewhere new, and that is frightening.
It seems to me drugs are quicker, but less profound. There is something about dwelling on that threshold (nod to Van Mo), and crossing it in little ways over and over, that opens it wider, and allows, over time, more and more of the energy of that space to billow into and occupy your life in your normal waking hours. I feel what is in my future are more and more happy days, a fascination with life and the world around me, and the ability to see people as they are and love them anyway.
I do feel often that some part of me has a large cloak over it. It is hidden, from myself and the world. It is a part that sees nearly everything, that feels nearly everything, and if it were liberated all of a sudden, it would flood me in an unuseful way. But again, I can pendulate over that threshold and back, and train that part of me which is actually in touch with my true needs to gradually increase the information it gives me, as my ability to digest it increases.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING NOT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Tonight, driving to my workout, it struck me that once one grasps the ubiquity of developmental and shock traumas, you have to rethink the whole concept of morality, and the concept of free will and responsibility upon which it is based. These things color entire lives, often without the person ever realizing they are there.
I continue my study of history. I spent about 10 hours last week listening to Gibbon, and 2 hours yesterday working through Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale”. As I think I mentioned, it is fun to check the audios out from the library and listen along. You get far more of the nuance.
Be that as it may, it seems to me that violence and submission have been the rule for most of human history. Servants and masters. And what serves those causes best? Trauma. Fear. Violence. For most of human history, most people have been driven by forces which we would today call manifestly pathological, but which were efficient and accepted in their social orders.
One sees Marxist treatments of power relations, but where are the narratives asking how the need for power came about, and what the psychosocial solutions to this lust are? Revolution, involving the same people in the same culture, can only achieve the same result. That is what happened in Russia, and China, and Cuba, and Vietnam, and Korea. Yes, they traded one rhetoric of power for another, but not the inner forms, the inner compulsions, the inner violence, and the rationalizations for preexisting realities.
Again, if you want something REALLY new you have to grab your balls and jump in the deep end. Or start in the shallow end, and wade out. However you do it, you must go where you have never been, and never wanted to go, because it is unknown. Intellectuals, their conceits to the contrary notwithstanding, invariably go to what is known. They just rename it, then proclaim themselves geniuses in, say, the way the Roman Catholics proclaimed their superiority to the Arians. They then pretend this subterfuge is new, when in fact it was old 2,000 years ago.
We see philosophical treatments of free will which go nowhere. The new fashion is to look at evolutionary biology, and things like epigenetics, to try and say intelligent things. This doesn’t interest me.
But where do we see people talking about the manifest fact that we have unconscious minds which are often programmed to react in habitual and even reflexive ways?
It seems to me it is far better to talk about emotionally healthy and emotionally dysfunctional than good and evil. In my own way, I have anticipated this by making Goodness contingent upon emotional realities which are only open to the healthy. I see Tarthang Tulku anticipating this by promulgating a practice which teaches people how to “make their homes in the world of feeling”.
Wherever one comes down on the free will argument–and it remains my view that to reach a final conclusion on the operation of the system one would have to be external to the system, which is not finally possible for humans–it is a manifest and obvious reality that most people operate with little more self awareness than dogs and cats.
Yes, decisions are made. Yes, reasons are offered for those decisions. Sometimes those reasons are valid, but particularly in emotionally charged issues, that is rarely the case.
As I open and penetrate my own inner space, I can feel clearly what has been driving me. After a certain period of practicing Kum Nye, feelings come to have an almost tangible, touchable reality. They are like words made manifest. You can touch them in space, and move through them, get to know them, all without any actual words. It is an extremely interesting process, even if it remains one quite often filled with pain for me. I am in touch with rage, and I don’t like it. I am in touch with rage, and I realize it is me, too.
MY FINAL POINT
I was feeling non-judgmental the other day, and it hit me that judgement is always a splitting of the psyche. To call something good you have to call something bad. And to say that both the good and the bad are possible is to say that YOU have both in you, since you are capable of both. So you develop a split in your psyche, between the part of you that you accept, and the part of you that you reject; the part you feed, and the part you consciously starve.
But it is all you, and in rejecting a part of yourself, you are committing an act of violence on yourself, one which is unjustified, because to be capable of conceiving a sin is not the same as committing it, and even committing it is not the same as BEING a “sinner”. The “being” part is added as a feature of the attack pattern you already programmed, which was an essential element of the judging process.
There is a certain nimbleness needed for morality as I conceive it. You cannot get stuck. You do not get to imbibe one moral order forever and then apply it mechanically with no more thought than a postage machine.
And the moment you create the good you create the bad. This is a pretty standard Taoist concept, but virtually everything in the Tao Te Ching and other Taoist texts goes very, very deep.
I would say that Christianity created Satanism. Satan had no power, Satan was not an important figure in any religion, until the possibility of heaven created the need for hell.
Certainly, you had cults like that of Baal, in which living children were thrown into massive fires. One can likely see evidence of a sacrificial cult in the story of Abraham and Isaac. These have always, in my view, been the emanations of unprocessed, deep traumas.
But to make an ideology out of it, requires a prior ideology.
To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, who can walk quietly, leaving no mark? Who can pass through the doors without a key, and without announcing themselves? Who can tend a garden which always blooms? Who can look into the Sun without flinching?
Oh, I’ll leave it at that. I am not drunk, but I am drinking. This has been a very odd day. I don’t know what to make of it, and there is no one to ask, to consult about it, or who would really understand what it is I am feeling. I value and fear my freedom and solitude.