Personal Pain

Sometimes when I am courting excess drug use and party atmosphere, I fall into a kind of "spiritual exhaustion". It feels like a wet, uncertain sliver opening up in my breastbone. I find it difficult to feel confident - a slippery nervousness that gets jostled with every breath. Usually it will close after a good amount of sleep, or after a relatively sober time passes. It is undesirable state, of course.

But recently I had opportunity to more deeply explore this feeling. The circumstances and influences were manifold: a bit of drug use, but also premenstrual tendency toward weepiness, a ripening moon, and mounting sleep deprivation. All this mired in the middle of 24 hour Twin Peaks marathon, and exacerbated by intense interpersonal social scenario.

Possibly the most important factor here is the Marathon. Twin Peaks is a serious piece for me, and I developed this event - open to the public, put on at a community center - primarily because I had a desire to ... realize the series as a complete work in time, a whole. What would that be like? Though I've viewed it a dozen times, I have never dedicated that full chunk of time ... it was an experiment of sorts. ... I would do it differently in the future. The series is simply too uneven to be consistently compelling, with the extreme dramatic climax happening midway and losing steam afterward. But that climax ... with all its horrific, overwrought, poignant sorrows ...

With the progression of episodes happening in succession, it was easy to let the terror and despair compound upon themselves. And I was feeling emotionally unstable. AND there was the aforementioned "intense interpersonal social scenario". I can't be too specific there - suffice it to say that I was perceiving, experiencing, what (in my paranoid state) amounted to a complex but thorough rejection - personal insult - through a group of people whom I had found myself growing complicatedly closer to over the last month. All my delusions of blossoming friendship ran up against this cold wall - I felt so disrespected - and yet - what was my behavior? I could not resist - I got closer. I sat myself in a chair right outside the knot of this group of people. The feelings of betrayal that their chatter inspired in me blossomed ... the sliver of nervous exhaustion grew! To a full, round disk of raw, wounded insult. I would realize this intense sensation in moments, blinking on with each burst of their laughter, and I was fascinated by how huge it was in my body. It had grown from a sliver to command my entire chest, from shoulder to shoulder.

Finally, I took control of this feeling of emotional wounding, and sustained focus on it. When it rose like a tide, I seized it and held it in place. ... My entire chest felt ripped, trembling, agonized from this absolutely pure Rejection, and somehow, I began to savor this feeling. It made so much sense - the deeply horrifying murders on the screen, the portrayal of extreme and devastating loss, and my own sudden ability to really, truly experience Intense Personal Pain, to hold the horror in a ravaged body, to feel the depths of something so terrible. This concept of garmonbozia - pain and suffering - established in the TP universe guided me, no doubt. Having achieved some kind of revelation in my being, suddenly the offending social circumstances - still quite present - sunk into the background. It was all no less insulting, but being trapped in this vibration of something so Wrong, so Awful, brought a detaching transcendence, a grievous personal suffering crystallized in a perfect, unstable, degraded physical sensation.

I have always felt quite tenderly towards grief, and been comfortable in the presence of depressed individuals - I mean I don't try to create depression or grief. These things naturally occur and I guess I "enjoy" the subdued feeling they create in others, and my inclination is to help find some measure of relief for that person. I suppose it amounts to something more than hanging out, when depression is present - there is a goal, there is emotional work, there is the opportunity to change and shape circumstances and response. But this was my first experience of "crystalline, transcendent grief". I don't know why this should be a positive experience for me, but I can return to the memory with fondness. The recently cultivated feeling still echoes in my chest, and I am proud of it. Why would this be?

Call to spirit

SO

I am trying to figure out how to talk about "spirituality". Mostly when I make a stab at one of these bloggys here I am expressing frustration about the way "spiritual" topics have become an object of derision, scorn, neglect, or outright dismissal. It is not strange - it is a cultural phenomena. Sometimes I blame "science", though I am in fact not an enemy of scientific ideals. In fact, many occult (re: New Age) pursuits have sprung out of a thirst to scientifically test, pursue, explore the unseen world. On the other hand, we have "religion", which has become popularly synonymous with "spirituality", providing reams of (sometimes contradictory) dogma, yet excluding whole chunks and fields of possibilities and curiosities.

So we are basically a culture trapped in our own spiritual ignorance. Let us see the range of topics that could fall under "Spirituality", including but not limited to what we might find filed under "New Age" in the bookstore, to try and understand how inadequate and broad our culture is in seriously addressing invisible (occult) experiences.

Afterlife: ghosts, ancestors
Psychic phenomena: Extrasensory perception
Acknowledgment of Consciousness of objects, plants, animals, place, weather, planets &c
Hypnosis
Divination techniques
Healing techniques (the body energetic)
Prayer and Communion
Meditation and Astral Travel (concentration toward spiritual advancement)
Morality
Personified entirety: God(s), Universe
Historical Pantheons
Aliens
Channeling
Contemplative Astronomy based on observation of heavens
Coincidence
Apocalypse
Christian Charity, Love, and cult societies
(Religious Dogmas and Conspiracy Theory)
Occult Study and Practice
Ritual
Magic Powers and Will Working
Miracles
Dreaming
Drugs: (Intoxication), Revelation
Meaning of Life
Creative endeavors, Imagination
Megalithic mysteries
Darkness to Nothingness (the unnameable)
Conjunctions and agreements among world myths
Angels, Fairies, Allies, Demons, Shadows
Contemplation of Inner Earth
Systems of personality inspection and deconstruction
Self-denial and ego abandonment
the Holy, surrender
Virtue
Visions
Vibrations
Pursuits of individuals like Reich, Jodorowsky, &c
Commentary and some philosophical consideration


Whew! I will try to organize this list a little better as time goes on.

Problem #1: "Belief" This is the first block to surpass when trying to forge a dialogue about spirituality. I speculate that EVERY HUMAN has a positive association or conviction with AT LEAST one item on the above list ... but also a bristling irritation with other items, for a variety of reasons. Religion has imposed this false requirement of belief and Science has made it possible to opt out of belief through the finely honed technique of skepticism. So we are left at a crossroads where we are allowed to dismiss and reject anything that is not convincing enough. But here we lose! The invisible world is not here to convince us - the invisible world is perpetually at our fingertips, available for observation.

I am here to say that it is NOT my belief but my real Feeling and my record of experience that causes me to regard all of these topics with a credulous, curious, and open apprehension. I feel it is possible to be credulous without being gullible. I do not blame the derisive spirit that denounces Spirituality on the basis of observed abuses in the name of spirituality - frauds often operate by claiming spiritual facility or authority. But I do struggle against the cumulative result: a "too cool for school" attitude of nihilistic resignation, and a death-averse culture emphasizing "jobs", structures of entrapment and glowing rectangles.

And I do have a suspicion: that the disconnection between humans and their own spiritual potential is no mistake, but an insidious plot meant to distract a man from her own personal power, ability to self-heal, create, and participate in community, for the purpose of providing a pliable work force for corporate interests. I do believe in an enemy, in the soul-suckers, in a zombie apocalypse that is at close range on a daily basis. I don't want this bastard health care of symptom suppression, I don't want this fear of age, of death, of neighbor, this vast programming of self-doubt and face painting. I cannot name the true face of this vast Soul Suck, but I feel it - so pervasive and so contrary to the experience I am having as a human that I imagine it must be in some way conscious, imposed, not accidental. To attempt to name this "conspiracy" plunges us into the world of doubt, disbelief, argument and derision all over again - it is best to stay out of it, looking under rocks of better promise.

More later.