Turns out, reverting onself to primordial goo in order to facilitate spiritual transmogrification takes a while.

After finishing yesterday’s blog entry, I turned the lights out in my room. put on that certain song that means so much to me, and willed myself to formlessness.

And it worked…. a bit. I could feel myself kind of melting inside. I felt like I was getting closer to a primordial state.

But it turns out that is not the sort of thing one can merely will. It will take some kind of massive spiritual event to trigger the sort of transformation I desire.

The pysche, it would seem. does not surrender its structure easily, which is probably for the best, if you think about it.

But without any spritual tradition to point me in the right direction, finding that trigger is going to be a very arduous and extremely intimate process.

I am going to have to dig very deep into myself – to go under, as Nietzsche would have put it – in order to find that trigger, and that means leaving the cold but comforting light of my overweaning intellect and goings into that deep dark forest of emotion, instinct, and drive that scares me so much,.

But fuck it. I want to escape this messy little cage of mine and I am willing to do whatever the hell it takes – even risk my sanity itself – in order to do it.

I’ll even write poetry, for fuck’s sake. Official poetry, that is. not the odd poetic jaunts that I go on within the prose of this blog.

Clearly, I have poetry in me that needs to come out. Might as well make it official. All I’ve got to do is give myself permission to do it and ignore the voices in my head telling me it is both self-indulgent and pointless.

I can see those voices for the bullshit artists they are. They just say those things as a cover for my fear of that deep dark forest of real emotion that poetry would access.

Well I am through with that bullshit now. For years I have been saying that there is nothing inside me worth keeping if it gets in the way of my mental health, and that statement of existential readiness remains true.

But I can see now that it did not go far enough, so here is the updated version : there is nothing inside me that I am afraid to show the whole fucking world if that is what it takes for me to escape my cage.

That bypasses all that pointless and unjustified shame I have been holding inside since the day I was raped at the age of four and makes it clear to myself and the universe that I no longer give a damn if people flee screaming from the real me.

Damn, that’s a scary thing to say. But it feels real good too.

I’ll be a motherfucking troll under a bridge living all by myself in a cardboard box and being used by parents as a bogeyman to get them to behave if that is what it takes.

“Eat your vegetables or the FRUVOUS will get you!”

I will turn myself into a public pariah – leper outcast unclean – if that is what it takes.

Hell, I will even become that raging arsehole I have been holding back for decades if that is what it takes, and he is my worst nightmare of my worst self.

Well, journies of self-actualization sometimes go through some very ugly terrain and I might have to become a lot worse before I get a lot better.

Certain, I need to bridge the gap between me and him. Or me and me, if you want to get anal about it, because unpleasant as he is, he’s me as well.

And one of the lessons I have taken from tales of serial killers and spree killing shooters is that the extreme and crazy part of my mind is directly related to my being passive and meek and unable to successfully set boundaries in my life or express my anger at all.

So I wouldn’t have this side of myself trying to come out who is this rage filled, viscious, bullying, battering, smug trickster of a self-centered prick if I did not bottle everything up, especially my rage, and create the exact conditions that create such an ill representation of myself as a response.

There would be no Mister Hyde if Doctor Jekyll wasn’t such an id-denying intellectual. Ditto with the Hulk and Bruce Banner. I bet both of them could be cured if they would simply acknowledge that their alter egos are them too and that it is their ferocious battle with their own ids that creates the monsterous sides of themselves.

We cannot let the beast inside rule us but suppression is not the way to achieve that aim. In fact, it produces the opposite effect – the beast rages when ignored.

The only long term solution is a negotiated peace, and that starts with a confession :

That aggressive, abusive asshole is me. I am the one who wants to unleash my full intellectual powers on the world without any regard for the consequences to others. I am the one who dreams of being an intellectual ogre who doesn’t give a shit about anything but his own amusement and is perfectly willing to bully, dominate, manipulate. or even eviscerate whoever is unlucky enough to cross his path to get it.

I’m that guy. That is me. There is no “him”. He is me and I am him, just as much and to the same degree that I am the Fruvous everyone knows and loves.

The real me is someone I have yet to meet because the real me lies at the geographical statistical midpoint between all these different versions of myself, and if I want to reach a state of happiness, all my shadows will have to merge and become one entity.

And then it will be just me, the real me, naked, defiant, and alone, ready to face the world as an army of one and make a place for myself in the light.

That is what I am fighting for and that is what I believe.

And may the Metaconscious have mercy on us all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And the ghost grows bigger
And colder
And stronger
And every time it passes me by I feel it deeper
And closer
And deadlier than ever
And the void screams louder
And deeper
And more dreadful every day
And I know that this is the endgame
This is the quickening
This is the time when it all comes together
This is when the poison reaches the heart
This is the prelude to the final terrible act
When the void hits the flesh like a hammer
When the light has to mingle with the dark
When the black hole devours its children

And the Old Soul finally dies

And I am either liberated…. or destroyed.

And God as my witness, I don’t know which I prefer

Michael bertrand, dec 31, 2018

Told you I was going to start writing poetry.

At least I think I did.

Depression has been pretty bad lately. I feel like it’s all building up to something. Apotheosis, perhaps. Or some such thing.

Don’t worry,, my friends, I am not suicidal. This is all internal. Suicide is not even on my radar. The above bit of blank verse describes a spiritual experience, not a physical one.

So yeah, I have been more depressed lately. In those unguarded moments between distractions, my sense of dread at having to face reality and make decisions grows larger than it has ever been. I find myself sleeping as much as I possibly can just to escape these deep down chills I feel as the ghost of all my pain keeps barely missing me, as if teasing me with the sure and certain knowledge that this dance can’t last forever and when we finally connect, I will die.

But not like, death death.

More like the death depicted in the Tarot card Death. Not death of the flesh but a change so big that it changes who you are, and so in a sense it is the death of the person you thought you were.

It can be hard to tell the difference.

But this sort of Death sets you free because the Old Soul dying makes room for the New You to emerge, forever severed from the false idol of delusional self-image.

That is the nature of knowledge and growth. For knowledge to flourish, ignorance must die. And for life to grow, its previous form must die, like a snake shedding its skin.

Always remember : for every butterfly born, a caterpillar must die.

In the name of predictability and stability, I have resisted my own metamorphosis for a very, very long time.

As a result, I am a very old caterpillar indeed.

That is not good.

But I think I am ready now. Ready to surrender. Ready to let it happen. Ready to let myself melt into the primordial goo from which all life is born so that I might abandon all form and color and content and let myself be remake by the highest force within me.

Call that God if you want. I call it my Metaconscious Mind. Note the capitalization. It’s to denote that this is the highest, strongest, most sacred part of my mind.

It’s to tell you that my secularization of the concept of God should in no way diminish your sense of how seriously I take it or how much it means to me.

To be remade thusly is to be reborn, divine intervention or no.

In fact, I have often felt that the mystics and I were talking about the same things, just with different metaphors.

It even involves a kind of faith – faith that this transformation will make me a better person. Specifically, that it will let the stronger, healthier. happier version of me that has been growing inside me for so long finally be born into the world through the blood abnd screaming fury of my inner demons dying.

Being reborn is rarely a clean and pleasant thing.

So the coming collision is a resolution devoutly to be wished. The hot and cold circuits of my mind, as well as the hot and cold parts of my soul, will come together in a great cacophony of steaming, screaming, dreaming chaos and from said chaos will emerge whatever it was that I was supposed to be in the first place.

And what happens when ice and fire meet?

You get the Flood.

I guess I know why that song has always spoken to me on a very deep level now. It’s the very thing I have been working towards without knowing it for many, many years.

At the same time, it’s also the very thing I have been studiously avoiding by staying buried in my distractions and not giving myself the chance to think about things all that much – not the things that actually matter.

And because of that song. I know better than to try to cling to my little island universe in face of the raging waters of the Flood. That will only lead to my drowning before the Flood can cease and the waters can recede.

I’m ready to give it all up – to become the goo in the coccoon that was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly but currently is neither – in order to be transformed and liberated.

I am a dreamer – I am willing to admit to and own that now – and I have been running dry for a very long time. And I desperately need to drink deeply of the waters of life and replenish my supply of vital energy and let all of me come alive at the same time instead of living such a brutally compartmentalized existence.

Now is the time for all to come together
Now is the time for all separations to end
Now is the time for the waters to merge and become as one
Now is the time to surrender all we are in order to become who we were meant to be
Some will call that Death
Some will call it Liberation
Me, I call it Coming Home
And it’s about damned time.

michael bertrand, dec 31, 2018

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.