So I was dreaming last night I walked into a sort of clinic and they were giving out a zombie vaccine. This vaccine required a shot in the stomach and one in the arm, and then you would turn into a zombie. This was understood at the outset.
I asked them if the effect was temporary, and they said no, it’s permanent.
And I asked them what it did, and they looked at each other a bit uncomfortably, as if that question was so stupid they weren’t sure how to answer it.
And I got it. They shot me in the stomach in the same way you would a victim of rabies, but this was supposed to, more or less, CAUSE rabies.
I remembered this dream in my meditation this morning, and asked myself what it was all about. Am I regressing? Has my ability to say no somehow eroded? Am I becoming a conformist, or giving up?
And it hit me that I took that shot many, many years ago. I feel I had some sense of possibility up to about age 7, then it was all taken from me and existence became a quest for survival, one bought at the cost of conformity to generalized lunacy.
And it occurred to me growth requires remembering and seeing the cages you have lived in, grown accustomed to, accepted. I have accepted cages. I do not want to admit it. I don’t want to have to say that I gave in, that I accepted defeat, that I quit and embraced my captors. But what else can you do as a child? The proposition made in my family was submit or die. I am still here, and some part of me likely believes that submission is necessary for survival. Obviously, my rational mind, and my protective selves do not.
And then it occurred to me without exception all adult humans have accepted cages as the cost of maturing. They have internalized artificial barriers, creating emotional “no go” places, and consequently, that all human beings on Earth would benefit from sustained and focused and methodical inner work. Not just the misfits. Not just those of us with symptoms.
You can see the person having vigorous conversations with themselves in People’s Park in Berkeley and call those presenting symptoms.
But can the perceptive also not see the countless negative hallucinations which constitute mass delusion? Can we not see the dialogues which SHOULD happen, but do not?
We cannot have universal peace until we have universal mental health, and we cannot have that until all people are willing to learn who they are, accept themselves, and become able to relax on a very deep level with grace and ease.
There are certainly signs that people in some ways have become more introspective, but it seems to me most on all sides of the political spectrum where most people live have little to say about the propagandas of efficiency, of pursuing happiness, of membership in an anomizing industrial and post-industrial order.
With regard to happiness, it occurred to me yesterday that natural life includes periodicity. You cannot be happy all the time, but if you allow it, it will come regularly, like a wheel. Only when you make an end of it, only when you pin it down and demand it fly, will it stop coming.
Happiness is something we are supposed to be able to produce, like Fig Newtons, and #2 pencils. And in an industrial economy, the answer to a consumer need is a manufactured product. We have a Happiness Industry.
But I get the sense that most of the smiling faces at these retreats, most of the people who write the books, are acting. They are playing a role. They assume that because they did all the happy things they must be happy. Certainly, they want to SEEM happy. And we see these people who have visited, say, a castle in Armenia, and posted pictures, and think WOW, IF ONLY. . . .
I am certainly not well traveled, but I’ve spent time in many of the major cities in America, lived for at least months of time several times in Europe, and am even now often on the road seeing new things. And my experience has been that no travel ever brings me more satisfaction than my daily Kum Nye session. That is where the movement that matters happens, for me.
It is possible to imagine an emotionally organic order. It is possible to imagine a world where everyone takes the task of self knowledge and growth seriously. We are merely opposed by ghouls who do not know that they took the zombie vaccine long ago, and see their incoherent and unprincipled rants as the essence of reason, the summit of virtue, the purity of truth. Up is so often down that few seem willing to question it.
I am and hope to remain one of those few. I will carry on with my project even if I get no more votes.