Daily Archives: August 5, 2014

A leaven of sadness

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Feeling melancholy and introspective today, so be warned :

Here comes the angst.

Dunno why I feel this way. There’s no obvious reason for me to be sad. My knee is still messed up and I am somewhat stressed by the whole house hunting thing, but neither of those has gotten worse lately.

I guess it is just that time of my mood cycle. The time my body and/or my mind sets aside for actively feeling a measure of the deep and abiding sadness I carry within mr.

One possible trigger, however, is this documentary I watched about the hallucinogen ayausca, and its active ingredient, DMT, or di-methyl toluene. You might remember that I spoke about this topic once before.

Don’t worry, I won’t be ranting about transcendentalists today.

In the documentary, we follow three Canadians as they journey to Peru in order to take part in an ayuasca ritual run by a wise old Shaman who will be their guide through what will be a difficult and profound experience in both the physical and mental realms.

Seeing people go through the emotional purging of the ayuasca ritual got me thinking about my own demons, and how good it would be to be able to cut through all my resistance and confront all my demons all at once, and be done with them.

I would definitely try the ayuasca ritual if I had the opportunity. I would be scared out of my mind, but I would do it anyhow. I don’t care what kind of hell it unleashed. It would be worth it to rid myself of the emotional residue of my forty one years on Earth.

For someone who truly believes in catharsis like I do, ayuasca is the ultimate drug. A new kind of drug : a cathartic.

Imagine what something like that could do for the world.

So I guess that seeing other people deal with their deep issues and imagining myself in their place helped me bring up some of that deep sadness that I carry around with me in my sad and lonely heart.

Right now, I don’t feel good at all. I feel cranky and restless and that reliable demon self-loathing is very close to the surface and threatens to break out at any second. When I feel like this, hating everything about myself is very easy, and it takes a certain amount of will to resist it.

I can only resist it by pushing the thoughts back down when they emerge, which is no long-term solution, I admit, but it gets me through the day.

It’s times like this when I wish I had access to a gym so I could take all this raging energy and expend it via exercise.

It would be especially good if said gym had a heavy bag, the kind boxers use. I bet spending twenty minutes punching the shit out of a heavy bag is almost as cathartic as an ayuasca ritual.

Well, maybe not. But I bet it would help a lot.

Instead, I sit here trying to let it out through words. I suppose that is also a sort of exercise, but for mental as opposed to physical muscle.

And quite frankly, my body needs it a lot more than my brain.

It is times like these that also make me realize, acutely, how unsatisfying my life is. I want so much more out of life, and yet I can’t seem to find it in myself to find a path between the life I lead and the one I want.

Applying to VFS was a big deal to me. It was supposed to be my ticket out. Losing that, after convincing myself that I was a shoe-in to get it, really took the wind out of my sails. I have never handled disappointment well, and this was a doozy.

I tried not to let it take all the hope out of me. I tried to stay focused and work really hard to find some courses to take so I could reapply in the new year. I tried really hard to stay on track.

But there’s a hole in the bottom of my motivation bucket, and when I got rejected for VFS, all my motivation drained out of me and I went back to being the lump that I have been for 20 goddamned wasted years of my life.

That has a lot to do with why I am getting back into doing videos. It might not be much, but it is a way for me to give more purpose and focus to my day and make my life be something more than distracting myself between meals.

I find the prospect of living the rest of my life like that fills me with horror. I want my life to mean something. I want to be noticed. I want to be recognized for my abilities. I want the chance to apply those abilities, and in doing so, develop them further. I want to make things that make people happy and maybe even create a little magic in their lives.

And I can rail against VFS, fate, my parents, and all kinds of other things for “holding me back”, but that sort of answer has never really satisfied me.

And I know the truth : there are millions of possibilities open to me, right now, from this exact position in life, and I am just too sick to pursue them.

And that frustrates me to no end. My newborn will and ego rail against the very notion of such petty limitations. They want to roar onto the world scene like a lion, rise like the sun, and shine so bright that the whole world can see me.

But that alone will not heal the broken bones and frostburn that scar me inside. Healing is never easy and it’s never as fast as we want it to be.

So I wait, and I sigh, and I do my best to heal a little faster today than I did yesterday, and continue this process known as recovery.

The lion will have to stay in his cage… for now.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

The secular mystic

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Mysticism mystifies me.

Having been raised without religion, I have no direct experience of it. I have no faith, in the classical sense of the world. I have beliefs based on chains of reasoning I find satisfactory. Faith is another matter.

And being a sensible rational pragmatist, that is all I have.

Oh, I am not claiming to be free of irrationality. You would have to be a lunatic to think that. I am as much a grunting naked beach ape as everyone else.

I know for a fact, in fact, that I believe certain things by choice, not because I have reasoned them out to be concurrent with the facts. Even the most logical of people will find that the roots of their beliefs are not rational.

For instance, the belief that what happens to humans matters.

But when I speak of mysticism, I am speaking of an entirely different mode of thinking. One that looks for answers inside the world of emotion, rating connections not by logical rigor but by emotional continuity, and which is perfectly willing to abandon rationality in order to find answers that satisfy a need within the seeker, a personal truth, inaccessible by rational means.

That’s all well and good, of course. Self-reflection is good for everyone, and whatever helps us solve the puzzle of ourselves and free us from the burdens of the past is fine by me. Psychotherapy would be impossible by strictly rational means.

The problem comes, as I see it, when these personal truths are mistaken for discoveries about the universe or life in general.

This is not done with malice. People are naturally eager to share the revelations that have healed them. And the ability to separate these mystic truths from the sort of truths that lead to a greater understanding of the universe under those circumstances is a very high level brain function indeed.

This is also what leads to the ages old struggle about whether or not a given religion is “true” or not. If a religion has brought great things to a person and answered their questions in a way that makes sense to them and makes them feel better about the world, then its truth is indisputable.

But this is not the sort of truth one can share. It is a personal truth, a key that was especially made for locks within your individual soul, and so while it is extremely true to you the believer, it is not applicable to anyone else’s locks.

Perhaps we all would be better off if religious believers learned to say “it’s true to me” when questioned. But people insist their religions must be literally, objectively true, and that is a recipe for failure.

From the point of view of a rationalist pragmatic utilitarian like myself, this all seems like madness. I have always held to the belief that the only route to truth s the rational examination and evaluation of evidence. Looking for objective truth by subjective and individual self-examination seems to me like trying to stay dry by going for a swim.

And yet that is exactly how truth was sought throughout the ages. Whether by prayer, meditation, psychedelics, fasting, or any other way to achieve a mystical state, people have delved into their own psyches in a dream-like state, and then emerged from the mystic state thinking they have learned something about the world.

I don’t quite buy it.

But I am far more open-minded about it than I used to be. It has occurred to me that, despite mysticism being useless (or worse) for finding objective truth, it can be damned effective at reaching the kind of personal truth that comes from the resolution of unresolved emotions that have accumulated in the psyche.

Taking a journey into one’s own mind in a dream-like (but more conscious) state in search of answers to one’s questions about oneself seems like it could be a very good idea to me, if done properly.

The mystic state owes much of its power in its ability to suspend rationality long enough for your unresolved issues to resolve themselves without the constant interference of our meddlesome minds.

This requires what is commonly known as “visions” precisely because this dream-like but conscious state needs to create a very vivid and hyper-real experience in order to resolve what might be decades of repression in a relatively short period of time. The only release for repressed emotion is through your conscious mind. You must finish feeling them in order to let them go.

So I ask myself, is it possible to partake of mysticism without abandoning rationality? Are the two compatible? Would be dogged pragmatism and demanding intellect bar me from reaping the benefits of this mystic state, however it is that you achieve it?

I think not, at least in my case, because while I am a rationalist, I am also quite comfortable dealing with intuition. I would not be very creative without it. Things pop into my mind all the time. They are then evaluated by the rational mind, but if what is in question is a creative issue, the rational mind only conducts the interview. It is my artistic intuition that makes the decisions.

So it is possible, at least for the likes of me, to rationally enter the mystic state. We simply do it knowing that we are not discovering anything about the world outside our own minds, but rather the truths of our own souls.

This kind of secular mysticism seems like a fairly slender and marginal thing to me. I have no idea whether it would even work for anyone else. Perhaps this entire exercise is my attempt to convince others that my keys will work in their locks.

But it is also possible that secular mysticism, as bare and weak as it seems now, could be the seed of a new kind of religious consciousness that, because it is grounded firmly in the knowledge of what is matter and what is mind, can unlock much of the pain that modern society simply cannot address.

I pray that the latter turns out to be true.

And I will write for you nice people again tomorrow.