Too bad it still holds all the cards.
By the deeper mind, I mean the deepest, truest, most fundamental level of your consciousness that exists. It is the “you” that has always been. It was “you” before you were even born. And it is the “:you”: that has answered to your name ever since you were old enough to know what it was.
Everything you are and have become is built upon this foundation. And no matter how tall we grow, it remains the soil in which our tree of life grows.
And it is very, very stupid.
How could it not be, if it came into being when we were nothing years old? Compared to it, our adult minds are dizzyingly complex metropolises full of bustling thoroughfares of thought and emotion and enormous office blocks of memory and knowledge.
But all of that is merely an extension of that early, primitive, deeper mind. We are like vast computer networks full of powerful microchips and intelligent machinery hooked up as peripherals to a calculator.
No matter how high we climb and how big we grow, it is still “us”.
This is a primary truth that cannot be altered. And yet, we try to escape it by any means we can. We are constantly deluded by our latecomer rational minds into thinking that if we just let it have its way, we can somehow escape our deeper selves and become beings of “pure thought”, or somesuch.
As if a tree can grow tall enough to no longer have roots. Such is the folly of asceticism.
I am convinced that many of our most persistent and crippling psychological and/or spiritual issues involve terrible injuries to this deeper self, and that these injuries cannot truly be healed by dealing solely through the higher branches that we think of as “us”.
True healing, the kind that lasts because it does more than merely alleviate the symptoms, it fixes the problem, can therefore only come from dealing with this deep and fundamental self and giving it what it needs to repair itself.
And that might well be something that strikes the advanced adult mind as absurd, or obscene, or humiliating, or just plain wrong.
Do it anyway, folks. Because unless it will ruin your life by landing you in traction and/or jail, it will be so much more than worth it.
It may well fix your entire life.
All of this is kind of bad news for lofty intellectuals like myself. I have obviously gone down the intellectual path for many a mile.
I mean, just look at how I talk. And write.
And that is never going to change. And it doesn’t have to. It is not necessary for us to abandon the city of the mind in order to work on the shotgun shack of the deeper self.
All that is needed is for us to surrender our intellectualism and bow to the fact that even we mightiest of minds are still nothing but calculators with fancy peripherals, and if we are to be whole and healthy and happy, it is the calculator that we need to fix.
And in the future, we will be vastly better off if we remember what we really are.
More after the break.
Life on Mount Olympus
It is metaphorically obvious that if, like me, you live with your head in the clouds most of the time, you are going to be very out of touch with whatever is going on way, way down there in the roots of our psyche.
Which is a shame, because that’s where the crazy lives.
But while I consider myself a pragmatist and therefore far too sensible for such obvious nonsense as asceticism, I am nevertheless extremely cerebral by nature and have been withdrawing further and further from the real, extracranial world ever since I was raped at the age of 4, and that means I am very far from those roots indeed.
So trust me when I say that this loss of contact with your true, fundamental self can really fuck you up good. Intellectualism seems like a good refuge from your troubles, and it can be, but by that very token, it can keep you from solving them, too.
This is how I became so detached from the world of the senses. Which is not very realistic or pragmatic of me.
I have a strong and defining lifelong pattern of keeping my contact with the real world of the five senses to an absolute minimum, preferring to get almost all of my input via the consumption of media like books, TV shows, video games, and YouTube.
Thus my contact with the real, sensory world is reduced to only the “safe”: audiovisual world of life seen through screens.
Which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the world of the mind without sensory input from the real world is highly unstable. The mind needs to be grounded in the sensory world or it becomes a very dangerous echo chamber that amplifies and multiplies every little fear, doubt, and evil voice until you can’t hear yourself think.
I know the exit from my depression runs directly through the world of the senses. I need to make and maintain firm contact with the real world so I can get the hell out of my head and maybe establish to my dumb deep self’s satisfaction that the world is real.
It’s real and true and unlike the eternal internal tempest of my mind, it is stable and predictable. My bed will still be there tomorrow whether I put any effort into believing in it or not. It doesn’t need my mental resources to stay real.
Unlike all my thousands of hours of virtual experiences, which exist almost entirely of data and have only the weak input of screens to keep them real.
I know a lot. But without sensory memories – experiences – none of it is real.
Right now, I don’t know the way out of this mess. I know that none of my usual tools like analysis and intellectual insight will get me there. I am going to have to go far deeper than such crudely logical tools can ever go.
And that means I have to stand there staring at the chasm between me and the real world until I learn to fly.
Knowing that the only way to learn may be to jump.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.