“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
David Foster Wallace, More Intelligent Life
Archive for March, 2012
So, last night, in the early hours of the morning, I couldn’t sleep. My solution was to pick up my mattress and drag it all the way over to the seaside. I positioned it, mid-beach, then laid back down. The temperature was neither warm nor cold, and there was no breeze to hint of any change in the weather. Calypso made her presence felt and laid peacefully beside me. The moon was full, and the stars of either now, or long ago looked on in approval. I lay still, and as a baby, let my lower abdomen take full control of my every breath. I yawned and allowed the mattress bear my entire weight.
The ocean russled…
The moon shone…
My limbs might just as well have been glued to the mattress, since they had remained motionless for hours now – so, instinctually, i peeled myself off its surface, and approached the shoreline.
I then found myself the perfect pozzy where i could play with the sticks, stones and sand. Instead of a castle, as such, i constructed a metropolis with tall structures, with roads where tiny pieces of dead wood played the part of cars and people. A setting within which it became increasingly possible to carry out myriad imaginations. A gritty world of happiness, of torture, and of the dramas I’m so desperate to see and vicariously live through.
What a wonder: the metropolis!
Ahh, its potential personas – they were suddenly so essential to me, in such a silent, stagnant paradise. Lonesome lucidity within such a polished self-satisfaction, and yet, what is it without a position or a direction even (and since my efforts to construct a steeple crumble, and will continue to crumble)?
The Shawshank Redemption will do as a beautiful metaphor for pain, disease, depression, and suffering in general:
THE PATH OF APATHY AND DESPAIR:
FINDING A GLIMPSE OF LIGHT IN THE DARK HOLE:
CHOOSING LIFE:
When pain first arrives it’s a bit like the cops bursting into your house and arresting you. Either you feel non-plussed, like there has been some kind of mistake, or you feel like you’re being punished for doing something wrong. There’s no mistake, and you’ve done nothing “wrong”, it’s just change, or what we’ve come to refer to as “life”. Certain liberties that you took for granted have suddenly been taken away. You receive a sentence or “diagnosis” and the initiation begins. Often they tell you that it’s a life sentence. You feel doomed. How to tell your friends and family? How will they react? It’s a bit like you’ve been banished from the garden of Eden, like Adam, with a great sense of shame.
Adam was overcome by this shame and simply accepted that he could no longer experience heaven. There wa another tree in the garden though: the tree of eternal life, from which, if he had eaten the fruit, he would experience what Andy did in the second clip posted above. The place (heaven) that can’t be taken away from you, and available to be experienced in an infinite variety of unique ways. Pleasure provides an opportunity to experience Unithou, just as much as pain does. Pleasure descends from a peak, whereas pain can ascend from the valley. We can equate this ascension to a prison break.
The Brooks character symbolises the person who accepts their fate, but then doesn’t attempt the audacity to try and change it. Those who attempt to strategically, and methodically change their lifestyle to increase their vibration and awaken the Eden within are choosing to “get busy living” as opposed to “getting busy dying” (the later is what organised religion is well known to encourage).
Remember also that there is another aspect to vitality: that of power which is gained through the experience and the enduring of suffering. A voyage through hell (the prison of the mind, or the “hole” of solitary confinement) in which the individual discovers a strength which would otherwise have remained latent. This brings to mind the science of “epigenetics”:
I like to post links to art that communicates what I mean by the vital energy ‘H’.
Just simply absorb this:
I’m going to begin to address the issue of emotions, which have acquired a bad reputation, but which, in themselves, aren’t evil. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the emotions relate to the organs of the body, for example, anger is the liver, sadness is the lungs, and joy is the heart etc. When an emotion is triggered, it stimulates the H (chi) of its associated organ, which is healthy, but becomes unhealthy when over-stimulated.
The best parallel is to compare the experience of watching a something in a movie, as opposed to experiencing it in your life. The watching of a creepy movie can stimulate your fear, and thus be healthy for the associated organ, which in this case is the kidneys. But if you were to actually experience the movie events in real life, the fear would be much stronger, and therefore depleting. We know that this fear can actually save our life and have us doing things we would never otherwise do, because our survival depends on it. Also, if fear were only at the level of caution, and no more, it would stimulate kidney H and be healthy. So we know that fear in these ways is useful.
All in all, the healthiest state is a balanced state, which is a state of relaxed joyful acceptance, but over-joy or elation can be deplete heart H.
So, with the awareness of this, we become conscious that the really bad things are indulgence in, and attachment to our emotions. When emotions define our choices, our free-will is lost, and they become like drugs that we begin to depend on.
I want to state that the darkest of all emotions are those that are completely useless to life:
resentment, despair, apathy, laxness, self-pity, self-doubt, hatred, anxiety and frustration.
I may have missed a few, but you get the idea.
American History X is one of my favourite movies, and I want to focus on how the dark emotions can be exploited. All of the dark emotions, or states of mind, make us vulnerable and predictable. In short, they make us prey to stockholm syndrome: we align ourselves with a nurturing figure, organisation, or agenda.
Now, we have here the two crucial points in Derek’s journey, where he’s overcome by the dark side, and is desperate for light. On the first round, his nurturing father figure comes in the form of a racist writer of propoganda, who teaches him to become angry (as anger is more useful than despair) and to become the leader of a reactionary group of thugs. This path does give him something to live for – a sense of purpose, but he begins to see that none of the other followers share his devotion to its principles (remembering that Derek is described as its “shining prince”). He turns away from them, and is therefore seen as perhaps “unpatriotic” to the cause, and is attacked by his former jail buddies. This leads him back to a vulnerable state, searching for light, and another nurturing figure appears, luckily a noble one this time, who shares with Derek his own past, and how he found the light by “asking the right questions”.
To be in the darkness is to be a slave. To blindly follow the herd is to be a slave.
To be in the light is to be conscious of your emotions and responsible for your own thoughts and actions. When we acknowledge that the brain is a computer, secondary to the heart, we can analyse what its been programmed with and ask “Is this software cultivating joy and vitality?” or “has anything I’ve done really helped me?”.
Click on this link to read about the findings of the research:
“Far more than a simple pump, as was once believed, the heart is now recognized by scientists as a highly complex system with its own functional “brain.”
UniThou 