Be that as it may, when insights–deep insights, about the past, about others, about Life–“intrude” on an average day, and square off, each in their own corner, against Time, who usually wins? Is it not usually a knock-out of the insight by Time, within ten to thirty seconds? Who has –what?–TIME to ponder the meaning and purpose and proper pursuit of life? Things to do, places to go, deadlines to meet.
It’s very tempting to speculate that it is not Time which prevents deeper thought, but rather that most people are quite content with an arrangement which keeps them from thinking too deeply. “Oh, I would explore those painful emotions, but I have a dentist’s appointment.” “Oh, I would wonder if I’m living my life right, but who even knows how to answer fucking questions like that, and oh look I’m late for something or other.”
Now, I am not saying that condescendingly. I may talk like I’m on the mountaintop, but I’m very much in the valley, often surrounded by fog. I get how painful all this can be. I get it personally, and daily.
I will say though that I have arranged my life precisely to support this sort of work. Right now, this very moment, I”m not at work. I have work to do this week, but it can be done at my own pace, on my own schedule. Until someone lights a fire under my ass–which may happen next week, although I very much doubt it–I can take an hour and do my personal yoga routine, and take 15-20 minutes to write blog posts like this.
My life is deeply uncomfortable at times, but I base it on a simple logic: if death is eternal, not much matters, but if we survive this life, then all we can bring with us is are the emotional riches we built across our lifetimes. Nothing else. As U2 put it, “all that you can’t leave behind”. This makes work on personal growth the only way to build meaningful wealth. This, then, means that economic “work” needs to be in support of finding time, and sufficient resources for whatever projects I may undertake, like Neurofeedback. This is my logic.
And many nights find me shaking like a leaf, screaming, speaking in tongues (more or less: I don’t know what to call vocalizing in a words which don’t match any living or dead language, and which I think hearken back to my time as an infant trying and failing to communicate my distress in words), and feeling like I am dying. And the demons of course. Let’s not forget those.
All in all, not an attractive picture. My life, as I have built it, is not easy. But I find no faults in my logic, so I persist. And as it happens, last night was free of everything but the vocalizing. No demons, no shaking, no major conflicts (although I did meet up with a Tier 1 SoCom unit for some reason: but no bullets were fired by anyone). This is progress. I’ve been working a plan I will describe at some point.
But it seems to me this morning I have no people and no place, and on terms which do not require me to compromise, I never will, until I create them. I have to create myself first. I have to be a stable person. To use the acronym, I need to be Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized and Stable.
Then I want to throw out seeds which will attract people I can bond with at a deep level. In the end, as I have said often, I want to create a “religion” suitable for our time and place. I have all the ideas. It’s a question of me being the sort of person that perceptive people would trust. I’m not there yet.
My work continues. Every day is a small death, and every death a small victory, and every victory a small step up a tall mountain. We live by dying, and we die more easily when we manage our fear of death.
In important respects, I think the Buddhist notion of Anatman amounts to this: if I am growing, then who I am today is not who I was yesterday, and who I am this morning will not be who I am tonight when I lay my head down. And when I wake up, who that person is will not be who laid their head down.
There is some part of our brain which ALWAYS seeks homeostasis, which seeks the One Answer, answered once and forever. At the ideational, philosophical, dogmatic level, you need a riposte to this impulse, to this voice, to this river of honest energy.
You have to be willing to lose your sense of safety, your ability to say, with seeming accuracy, I am “THIS”. You have to lose yourself to gain the world.
Or to put perhaps a new spin on an old quote:
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it”.
If you deduct the mumbo-jumbo presumably added by the early Church to increase their power, it’s not hard to put a Buddhist spin on Christ’s teachings. They needed Jesus to be absolutely unique, but he wasn’t. He was just another advanced soul doing his job. And I will continue to wonder if that soul, on balance, found his work more useful than harmful. There are lots of entries on both sides of the ledger. But the notion of universal human rights is, I think, a notion which emanated from Christianity. So too the disgust at animal sacrifice.
We would need to know how the next century plays out to make a final determination. And that process, of course, can still be influenced for the better.