Here we go. I've forgotten when was the last time I put up a new blog entry, but boy, am I way overdue for one.
In the past year, I have been stricken with a kind of intellectual disease, a religious fervor if you will, where I cannot help but consume all manner of religious and spiritual ideas to better realize the experiences I have had occur to me during this period. Everything from the Gnostic Gospels to Philip K Dick's thousand-plus page worth of mindfuckery entitled simply, "Exegesis".
I can't get enough. I can't stop reading. I can't stop watching documentaries on the subject either. It has consumed all interest that was once reserved for video games, flighty SF novels and films involving copious amounts of either gore, nudity or robots that shoot lasers from their eyes.
Because I am aware that this is the internet, I am reluctant to discuss the original impetus for this newfound motivation of mine to better understand my place in the cosmos. Not because I am afraid that someone will read this, but because I have reason to believe that there is something important going on with myself that needs to be kept private until I can first make sense of it. The internet never forgets, and while I do have the option of deleting past entries, I also need to be cautious in regard to data now being mined by the NSA and whoever makes up the Canadian counterpart of an intelligence-gathering organization. Should something ever happen, these words may come back to haunt me if there does indeed exist a database which has profiled me and added this blog to their repository. One can never be too cautious these days, and while common sense tells me that writing offline is what I should be doing, I cannot help but think that there is value in posting this on the internet. For some reason or another, I feel among my paranoia, a sense of duty and blogging these thoughts assist in realizing this. Don't ask me how or why or when, but it would not surprise me should at some point in the future, these words will be examined. Whether that will be to my benefit, or to my detriment, I can only wait and see.
It seems in 2009, a change occurred in me. I had experienced what is known as samadi. A Hindu concept of spiritual awakening where the subject becomes the object (at one with), and the ego gets pushed aside in receipt of a force that, in my opinion, could be considered as spiritual possession where your sense of autonomous direction gets pushed aside in favor of instinctual, or guided processes that appear to result in the appearance of coincidences resolving themselves within a larger framework. Or a higher purpose, if you should subscribe to the notion of pre-destination. It felt as if I was placed on a path that guided me towards greater understandings and richness of meaning, and throughout, I felt as if I were nothing but an observer to this guidance taking place.
In reading William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience" I have come to skimming through much of the anecdotal of what is described, and instead delving into the meat and potatoes of James's conclusions on the subject. He puts forth criteria that is common among those having experienced a spiritual awakening, and I was none too surprised to find that I have met his definition of it down to each bulletpoint he has listed in this book. Now that I have affirmed the legitimacy of my experiences, I can only take it to the next step and ask myself, why? Why have I experienced what I did? While I am convinced I know of the reasons (according to what James postulates), I am not convinced of the external cause, namely God or some superior intelligence intervening on my behalf so that I could realize some form of divine wisdom which previously had been withheld to me.
I suppose the correct approach is to accept that it just happens. When one hungers enough for truth, it is shown and my bafflement is a result of asking for too much, all at once, where I cannot process it in the way I would like to. The human mind cannot contain the vastness of the universe. To know all that has ever been written, acted, or said. It is an impossibility for an individual to fully hold all that is worth knowing, within the limited properties of his mammalian brain.
Yet, it feels like I have realized truth. That I understand it, and that I have a duty expected of me to honor it. But I what I concern myself with now, is realizing how best to disseminate what I have learned in a format that is easy to read and understand.
So that leads into the book I have written. At the time, while in possesion of this "spirit" and being given heightened faculties and greater depth of perception; I had erroneously assumed the very best of what it was that I was writing, and to become convinced that these words were of extreme importance and had best be handled in as inconspicuous a manner as possible. I honestly felt that what I had written, would blow everything apart at the seams and that the reader would no longer be the same once my words pass into their eyes and into their minds.
Boy, was I ever a schmuck.
In reading what I have written, I cannot help but be both proud, and embarrassed at the quality of what I managed to exhibit. In all these years of craving to become a writer, I had at the completion of my manuscript, felt that this, at the time, was the very best of what I could do. That it had achieved what I originally aspired towards for the particular theme and structure of the story. A review of it, yielded holes and choppy transition. Lots of needless exposition and generally, a poor organization and understanding of the structure a good novel needs in order to become appealing to to the intelligence and imagination of both the reader, and the author. At the time, I was somewhat aware that this book wasn't perfect. I knew I could always go back and fix it up, smooth the rough parts over and that slowly, but surely it will come to as perfect as I could make it.
It has not. Six months later, it has its good and bad and I am at a loss for further inspiration enough to bring it up to the standards I would like to see it at. I am my harshest critic, and it pains me to think that I was able to suspend all sense of reason and taste on the basis that I was in "tune" with a higher power of some kind.
Perhaps I was. But it is this doubt that confounds me. Why is it that I accept the validity of my experiences, but not the result of these convictions? Shouldn't an enlightened person be able to write well? Shouldn't the book be immediately worth publishing being that I wrote it in such a heightened state of mind? What exactly was I experiencing, if not communion with the holy spirit? Or some spirit?
That is what troubles me at the moment, to accept the notion that while I did have something extraordinary happen, I cannot for the life of me understand why it was that the book turned out the way it did. It calls into question the possibility that I was not in communion with anything outside myself, but myself. Then should I accept that possibility, I had to try and understand the why of it. Why has my senses sharpened themselves? Why did I feel so grossly inflated in terms of perceptual acuity and if this was me responsible, how can I come to terms with it? How can I ever believe in spirituality, if I deluded myself somehow and that these experiences were not a result of some holy visitation, but a part of my mind that decided to flip some rarely-used switches and transformed how I perceived everything? How can I rationalize the irrational?
I suppose that is where I am at the moment. I truly believe that everything has a reason, and there is purpose in the minuscule and mystical ways of being. My faith pulls me one way, and my reason, another in this endless game of tug of war that I am caught up in playing. There is no resolution to be had and the struggle, the journey will always exist between truth and deception. There can be no confirmation of one side or another, save for what one's intuition accepts, and even that is a wild notion in of itself. To surrender oneself to intuitive understandings, is to risk loss of reason and rational behaviour. There must be a balance that I am comfortable enough to live my life with, and I am in the most uncomfortable place at the moment.
Throughout all my questions and doubts, I can only hold a few ideas sacred. Principles that can never be violated, and one of them involves that there is a God in the universe. A creator, and that it is my responsibility to be able to discover how it is that I relate to this being, and what role is expected of me. That, to me is inarguable. There is no doubt in my mind, that there is a greater intelligence out there that has created all of what we see and know. But what is my relation to it? What is my duty to it? And should I realize answers to these questions, what is my reward for placing trust in such a deity? Should I not expect a reward for surrendering my will to it? Because I truly felt as if I have, and the results were not as satisfactory as I would have liked them to be.
So then, what is the point? If all the faith I can muster, all the courage and strength in the world results in my living an unhappy, loveless life working at a job that I hate, then what good is having faith? Why should I persist in cultivating it? Why do I continue to keep trying, knowing that at some point, my efforts will be in vain?
No matter how hard I try, faith doesn't seem to make any difference other than to pull me further into doubt, into more questions that I feel apprehensive about finding answers for; and the ridiculous part of it all, is the idea that I still believe. I still believe, no matter what happens to me, I still believe that there is a God out there and that I am in his good graces somehow. Somehow.
Maybe I am only seeing the forest for the trees and that inevitably at some point in my life, my sufferings will be looked on as having been necessary for what it is that I want most out of this world.
Love. Just to love and be loved. Who the hell would say no to that request? Why would God? Why would I? And it seems that the more I struggle towards those two things, the more elusive they become, the more frustrated I get and the more hopeless I feel. Then I hit bottom, and I somehow pull myself out of the abyss using nothing other than faith, which is almost annoying in it's tenacity to latch on; and I go back to repeating the same patterns that I have been all my life.
The worst part of all this, is the awareness. The knowing. The shame and liberation that awareness brings has been of little service to me when at this stage in my life, I should have long realized the mistakes I have been making which has kept me from getting what I want.
What I need. And I am reminded of Buddhism, that all life is suffering and while I cannot help but agree and yet, I still believe it is possible to forge a better me out of these fires I have burned myself in. That against all odds, everything will be okay. Even if much of my life has proven little in the way of an evolving of perspective that directly benefits and improves my worth as a human being.
It's all such a fucking tangled ball of yarn.
Who else but me can fix it?
Who else but me.
Right?
