Yesterday I got into a strange, turbulent, and emotional kind of miniature maelstrom of the mind. Something triggered an episode of intense hurt inside of me, and I spent the better part of the afternoon grappling with it. I tried to move deeply into the feeling, to not try to cover it up or bury it. My head was hurting and my stomach was acting kind of crazy and I couldn't eat and I just generally felt like garbage inside.
I started feeling kind of down on myself for a whole lot of ambiguous and phantasmal reasons. I kept hearing these little bits of self-deprecating mind recordings, surfacing out of my thoughts, and I kept wondering where they all came from. The more I listened to them, the more I began to feel as if I didn't know where they were coming from, and they seemed alien and more than a little sinister.
It seemed to me then that there are so many ideas that have somehow gotten into our heads while we weren't paying attention, and that these ideas not only get between us and reality, but between us and happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, and peace. I was in the bathroom washing my hands when I realized that these sort of ideas seem to have a life of their own, that they have gotten into us and used us to perpetuate themselves, and I started shaking and all the hairs on my skin sort of stood up.
There is a line from Fight Club speaking about how our generation has no great war or cause to fight for, and that ours is a spiritual war, and I guess whether people realized it or not it always has been. As I began to think about it more, I realized that the particularly difficult aspect of the war is that it is on two fronts, because it is no good to just pull yourself out of the fugue if other people are still under its spell. You may be able to love and experience them for who they are, but if all they are seeing is the opaque screen of ideas and programming that usually blocks all experience of things as they are, then...well, I don't know, the experience of loving seems sort of lopsided or incomplete.
I started feeling kind of down on myself for a whole lot of ambiguous and phantasmal reasons. I kept hearing these little bits of self-deprecating mind recordings, surfacing out of my thoughts, and I kept wondering where they all came from. The more I listened to them, the more I began to feel as if I didn't know where they were coming from, and they seemed alien and more than a little sinister.
It seemed to me then that there are so many ideas that have somehow gotten into our heads while we weren't paying attention, and that these ideas not only get between us and reality, but between us and happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, and peace. I was in the bathroom washing my hands when I realized that these sort of ideas seem to have a life of their own, that they have gotten into us and used us to perpetuate themselves, and I started shaking and all the hairs on my skin sort of stood up.
There is a line from Fight Club speaking about how our generation has no great war or cause to fight for, and that ours is a spiritual war, and I guess whether people realized it or not it always has been. As I began to think about it more, I realized that the particularly difficult aspect of the war is that it is on two fronts, because it is no good to just pull yourself out of the fugue if other people are still under its spell. You may be able to love and experience them for who they are, but if all they are seeing is the opaque screen of ideas and programming that usually blocks all experience of things as they are, then...well, I don't know, the experience of loving seems sort of lopsided or incomplete.