darkly dreaming

It’s odd, but watching a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church, (who own the God Hates America website among other credits), got me thinking about the role of hatred and resistance in my life. Normally I watch things like that, and have this gut wrenching hatred and anger that swells up at the harm that they are causing, not only to themselves, but to the unnamed population of kids and adults who don’t fit the straight christian lifestyle. It only gets worse when they throw in the word ‘fag’, one of a few slurs that make my body cringe every time they’re used. But I sat there, sometimes with my eyes closed because it was too hard to look at the main guy’s face, and it wasn’t making me angry. Rather, I was feeling compassion toward these people. Something that was incredibly odd to begin with, but especially of people that I view as abusing and twisting religion to suit their own selfish desires.

Thus, I took a moment to study what was happening to me, and this one incident began to place some other things in perspective. I found out recently about another in a longer chain of backstabbing abuses commited by some former colleagues of mine. I left my position as Sales Manager because I wasn’t able to mix with these two people, and at the time was very angry at having to do so. I wanted to blame them for all of it, of course. But as time went on, I began to first not care, and then to work through what had happened, and try to glean from it what I could; to grow in whatever areas I had been deficient. Still, to discover that even after I had quit, they persisted in maligning my character was too much at first. I kind of went numb all over. Afterward, as I began to face what I was feeling, I realized I wanted so badly to hate them. I wanted so badly to revile them, but I couldn’t.

In truth, I felt bad for them, and not in a superior way. Both of them had to make a very similar choice to the one I made a year ago; to leave the company and seek employment somewhere better suited for them. One of them has children to feed and cloth, and the other a long history of sorrow and pain. So in the midst of my simple desire to hate them, I instead found myself feeling almost love for them. If I had to name it, then compassion, universal human compassion. Suddenly the Buddhist teachings made so much more sense to me. In my desire to be angry I found instead the realization that I couldn’t hate, I had to love them. Not to make me sound wonderful, just that I actually tried, and failed in my task of hatred.

At some point in the weekend the idea of peaceful resistance came and went through my mind. It was the contradiction in the words themselves that caught my attention. I grew up Mennonite, and therefore still have very strong aversion to violence; yet I do not deny it’s place in the normal operation of society and the world. My ability to publish this is wholly dependent on the violent efforts of my ancestors, and even the contemporary efforts of my peers. But, the notion of resisting without violence had always been a nice idea, something to balance the need for the other. As the news of my maltreatment lingered, this was the belief that somehow came to be challenged. The link still escapes me, but I followed the thread to see where it would go.

Nowhere. At least, not initially. I don’t even remember being able to make anymore sense of it until I sat down to the program today and the numbness didn’t’ come. The anger wasn’t there, and this compassion that I thought was singular, seemed to have become more universal all of the sudden. I can’t cry, that ability seems to have left my emotional reach. But I do tear up just slightly on a few occasions. When someone sacrifices themselves for another, fictional or otherwise, especially if it’s a soldier; but also during these kinds of documentaries. I just feel so overpowered by the injustice of it, by the horribly monstrous attempts to vilify and invalidate another human beings existence. Those are angry tears, and they didn’t come.

This was it; the final piece in the burgeoning puzzle created by my uncharacteristic reactions. As I watched them protest all sorts of odd and honestly perplexing things, I wondered how I might ‘get back’ at them. Nothing. In fact, there is only acceptance and peace. Not acceptance as in turning away and ignoring it; the secular definition useful for the peaceable co-existence of conflicting viewpoints. This is an inclusive, supportive, acceptance that finds not a viewpoint, but a human being; and in finding that human being, loves them without condition. There was nothing to be done, not in resistance to them. I had to simply let my heart go and seek out the individual beyond the hate filled words and angry masks.

I suppose then, on a larger scale, this leads me to rethink a lot of those peaceful ideas I had clung to in childhood. Resisting is violent, it’s against the flow of things. I discovered a certain pleasure and success in doing so this weekend as well. As a kind of counter-weight to the path I’ve just explained, I also had some problems with a friend and finally just plainly addressed it, not exactly confrontationally, but very much direct; definitely not in the water flowing downhill way that I normally use. Also for a job that wasn’t getting back to me, I sent a direct and strongly worded email, getting an almost immediate response. Thus these two conflicting things were floating around my head at the same time.

I’ve not reached some amazing realization about all of it yet, but I do see some interesting things that I had ignored or failed to see before. Where I had assumed that these horrors wrought by religion required resistance, I find instead that they require compassion and acceptance. Yet, there is this piece to action that requires violent resistance, even in my own life. And all the while I hate doing it. My very being rejects the idea of it. But my being can’t eat if I don’t get a job. Hence the conflict between ideas and hungry reality. Where I had viewed myself as being peaceful, it was really just passive. Even going all the way back to my job, it wasn’t a peaceful existence that I responded with, it was passive. Realizing that I would have to move into an aggressive, violent role in order to renegotiate my work environment, I quit. It wasn’t a line that I was willing to cross into. But it wasn’t peaceful, it wasn’t the water way; at least not on it’s own.

Things are reversed at the moment. It’s a little odd, and definitely unbalanced for the time being. Yet peace seems to come out of it. I’ve released the violence where it was needed, and at the same time removed the need or desire to unleash it in other places. I’m sure some master ought to slap me with a stick about now. I do feel good; like something important has begun to emerge in my mind. In this moment, as I write, I am able to understand the master and his stick for the first time. How a purveyor of peace could use violent means to enlighten. I probably won’t take such a path myself, but the paradigm shifts of the weekend have at least given me some different ways to view my water metaphor.

I seem stuck in this belief that there will be something better further along. It was one of those incessant thing that followed me throughout my most doubt-filled times, when I questioned the nature of reality itself, I have always had this inexplicable feeling that something else is going on. Just this tiny little note of peace that seemed to fill in the gaps when I needed it the most. Now that life is feeling absolutely pressured, now that I begin again to question what the point is, I’m still stuck with that tiny little feeling that keeps me hoping despite all evidence and feeling that mounts against it. It’s odd, just this completely ridiculous belief that tomorrow will be better. No matter how many yesterdays that didn’t prove out, I still believe that tomorrow something greater, something better will come along.

This above all other things is the foundation for my belief, my faith, my spirituality; because I lost all else that had anything meaningful to say about this. Depression is such an odd little condition; insidiously comforting so that you believe all you truly need is yourself, even though you despise everything that you are on principle, still you persist quietly, hoping. When if falls upon you slowly, you can almost welcome it; the quiet between storms of genius or mad flights of imagination. Almost as though you expected it, even though you’ve forgotten what it was like every other time, and in the midst of it, you are convinced it’s never been like this before. Again, that hope, that delusion even, that this is as worse as it gets, and that something else is always better. A gentle confidant, it coos to you in deepening tones of despair, all the while slowly stroking it’s clawed finger along your chest, letting flow the life as though it were blood spilt upon the ground. If you’re lucky, you wish it were your blood; at least it would be something real.

Other times it comes on so fast you can feel your whole body begin to slow, and the skin tingle as though each muscle suddenly lost it’s vigor. Those are the worst time, because you were conscious of the process, you saw it glide across your heart and cool your blood to near silence. Where the world slowly fades from real in the quiet times, now it suddenly becomes a story; a fairy tale told by fools who still believe in rules of right and justice. Fools that continue in games of showmanship and love, fools that conjure happiness from potions of food and fun. These times are not gentle; they collapse atop you as a wave upon the sandbar, dragging you under but blurring your vision so that no way is out, there is only in. These times you fight, because you know better, you have only just left the way you wish things were; still fresh are the memories of the other time, the better time. These times you feel the loss, you mourn it with every labored breath.

And when everything is a joke, a stupid pun; when simply breathing is a questionable activity, then you are left only with your principles. You no loner trust the sensations so long regarded as real, the suggestions of life that you clung to with the fervor of fools too distracted to notice the gently peeling tide dragging them into oblivion. What is real? Because your body has stopped to function, it’s dead weight is carried only by your mind’s insistence that it above all else is still real, still exists. So you collapse inward until the things that support you fail, and you become a small lump at the center of swirling fantasy. You are not left with anything but that one, small belief; life is better than not life. Truly, it is the only belief worth having. And from that springs an eternal and unfailing hope. Something greater, something better.

Does it need an explanation? True beliefs may never. Once established by reason and fact, it is no longer a belief. That I call my belief God comes more from ease of use than something classic and codifiable. Should any theology speak to my soul, it would be Anselm. A God, the God, would be that which nothing greater can be conceived. Nothing is greater than a hope for life. I make rambling twists and turns through Jesus and Zen, whending my way home to a merry tune. These are pretense and locution; I know nothing more than hope, and of that I know very little indeed. I don’t believe in Camus, exactly; to die or to live is not the question. Even being and non-being go far beyond the issue. What drives us is the answer; is life worth the cost? Is there something greater, something better to be had that will cancel all the horrors that lurk among our days, preying upon our years? Negating life is an active decision, a rational decision; contemplating death is for mystics, but believing is the passage of all living things.

This little, annoying belief grows in intensity over time. It proves itself over and over again without evidence, and in the face of so much despair. It whittles away the will so that you must acquiesce for the sake of composure. It would be rude not to. The longer you believe it, the stronger it gets so that it despises any questioning, it loathes any attempt to reason with it. An indefatigable tyrant that lords its terror upon you even in the midst of pain and suffering. While the depression seeks to soothe you, to calm you; hope attacks you, rips at your chest and claws at your gizzard, poking flames of life into your hollow skin. You must move, for it will never cease, it will never tire; it will continue forward until death or destruction.

Thus, I believe in life. I believe that something greater, something better will come for me if I persist. I believe that whatever the cost, at least for now, life is worth it. I know things will probably worsen, that sickness and destitution linger about the edges of anyone’s existence. I know that tomorrow will most likely bring more bills and no jobs. I understand that no one will ring at nine in the morning and declare their undying belief in my abilities, offering me a posh job on the spot. Still I believe, I hope.

That I find peace in moments of surrender to the currents of impulses and allow them to wash over me is perhaps a way of centering, a way of achieving Zen. That I flow with the world, allowing it to guide me as best I am able, feeling what it wills and not directing whenever possible, is perhaps a way of achieving Satori. And perhaps, because I bless others whenever the mood strikes me, and seek the way from what I know of Jesus as man, just maybe, that’s a way to heaven. But such a thing is more dangerous than helpful. The moment I am sure that it is beyond this life that is something greater, something better; I will no longer believe, I will no longer hope. I would know, and by knowing, end.

Non-resistance, total acceptance, blessing; it is all I know. Everything else is conjecture built upon wishful thinking. There is a hope, and I am not its master. Today, I believe that something greater, something better is coming tomorrow.

I love Sartre right now. Let’s start with him here.

Everything takes place, in fact, as if our essential and immediate behavior with respect to anguish is flight. Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent; it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses.

I’m having some existential dilemmas when it comes to integration right now, and I got to thinking about the helpfulness of psychology toward authenticity.

Sartre captures the very problem that I am having with psychology, or I should say therapeutic advice, in my present circumstance. It’s the creation of an independent self, an entity that has actions of its own, and therefore controls our freedom. Sartre is right there to smack it down, and it’s the same thing that Zen talks about. It jazzed me up when I first read that excerpt the other day, and sparked a new campaign of writing, however, today it became even more clear to me realistically.

The presentation of reality to us causes fear and our natural reaction flight. That kind of encounter with existence is easy to keep away from by distraction and denial. I love doing those things, but now I find myself tired of it. I feel like I have to stop all the distractions and sit down for a while, and face it. I hate emotions, and I hate being emotional. My latest crisis is how to do what I feel to be authentic when there is no one around to do it with. This is where I really need Sartre, or some Zen master, to sit down with for like five minutes.

That’s more of a side rant to the bigger issue, and that is where do I find truth in the milieu I exist in? I’ve told my friends that coping is okay, that it’s natural to do it. But I also believe that at some point that coping has to come to account. I am an existentialist in my psychology, and I know that eventually all of these things will only keep you away from the root issue for a time. I think that it’s imperative to meet that root issue, and that it’s okay to have it destroy you at times. When you are secure enough to start recognizing your coping, you are secure enough to start working past the coping.

And that’s where I think that I’m having my current conflict. I get sage advice from friends about dealing with life, finding ways to be happy. And then one friend asked me, what makes you truly happy? It was rhetorical in context, but I chose not to take it that way. What makes me happy is not all the distracting coping mechanisms. Those aren’t real, and as soon as I know that, they are more hinderance than help. But what is the path to follow?

In a cognitive behavioral sense, we would just identify the behavior, and consciously change it to something that we want. I see this as trading one thing for another. It doesn’t really do anything about the basic level of whether we live for ourselves, or for our fear. What part of psychology is actually moving us toward authenticity? It seems that anything which strengths the idea of an independent self is really a move toward bad faith and away from enlightenment. ‘Do not mistake your finger for the moon.’ I may be an existential hedonist, that we should undergo as much pain as it takes to obtain the ultimate pleasure. It annoys me when people will not.

I suppose it annoys me more when people tell me not to do what I’m doing. Because I trust them, but I don’t think they’re right. I think they might be falling prey to bad faith themselves. ‘Don’t think, just go out and do.’ But even Zen recognizes that you have to ponder the idea of not thinking. You have to let the mind settle as it will. For me, part of the settling is recognizing all that which clouds my root issue. It’s like a simple exercise of noticing and letting go. I notice these things, these coping things, and then I let them go. (At least that’s what I really want to end up doing.)

It seems that ultimately, all actions that merely affirm the self as an independent entity, one that Sartre would see as the root of all excuses, and one that gives to the self our freedom, would be a move toward bad faith, inauthenticity. Yet, I know that I have received psychological comfort from the teachings of psychology, and given some in return. I suppose that is why they call it an existential crisis. Dilemma may be more appropriate in my case, ironic sense that is the root of the problem from Zen’s perspective, and perhaps this is my duality which must be transcended. But it looks like not today. I am puzzled as ever, but feeling deeply on account of it. Perhaps when I meet my zen master, she will rap me on the head and I won’t think so much.

I’m on a kick, I can’t seem to help it. I have this new obsession with understanding love more, or better, or perhaps offensively, more better. That’s half the problem, and I know it. You can’t understand something that is feeling. You can approximate it, or represent it with word pictures. But you can’t really ever understand it, I suppose. There’s a couple things that have me hung up right now, and they are the words we use for people that we love.

So I have family, and I’m allowed to love them. In fact, I’m expected to love them. Then I have friends, and I love them, but in this kind of amorphous way that if you say it wrong, or to the wrong person then you’re weird and psycho. Chemistry is a word I’ve been using lately because it seems half way between love: I want to jump your bones, and love: Yeah, I’d bail you out of jail. But there’s the catch isn’t it. We can’t love without being in love, but then again we can.

I always think back to the Greek when english gets hairy. (I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong spelling, but I like the word anyway, it makes me think of gorillas picking fleas out of each other’s fur and eating them.) In Greek there were three words for Love. And it’s a preachers favorite thing to take them and make them this all powerful triad of meaning. But still, it is kind of nice having more options. Philos, as in love of knowledge, but also gives its root the english friend. Except it could also mean lover. And the Greeks had their share of friends with benefits. There was Eros of course, the dirty book isle. And the beloved Agape of christians. So their meanings were far more gray than preachers would like, but still three different options would be cool.

The reason I’m on the meaning kick in the first place is due to this great article in a book I’m too lazy to get down right now. It’s about language and narrative in cognitive science. One of the authors, Allen I hope, talks about how things like evolution can never be understood, because they can’t be narrated. First of all, that’s huge to me; it makes my belief in the power of metaphors take root. Then it’s kind of scary too. Especially since the one consensus I get is that you can’t describe love. Anything that I can’t understand scares the shit out of me. So I begin this wandering wonder, hoping that somewhere a grasp will appear.

Now I move over to Zen, (yes it pops up everywhere I am,) which talks about universal human compasion, which is I’m pretty sure a very english translation of love. Love of everyone, unrestricted, just because they are. We are okay with this in general though, usually. I love humanity, I love my friends. I love this friend in particular, ah there’s the rub. Every time I hear friends with benefits, I get this internal giggle. We have no way to describe people that don’t fit into the dichotomous categories of our language. I wonder if the church is responsible for that development in western language? It does seem like a church thing, you’re either married or celebate. So it’s okay to love everyone in a particular category, (’The Gays’ as my friend Wendy, and Kathy Griffin would say,) but loving one person in that group causes such a confusion.

So, being the wonderful linguists that we are, we came up with ‘in love’ to describe that change of state from the one thing we can’t explain to the other thing that we can’t explain, all so that we don’t get freaked out every time someone says ‘I love you.’ Where’s the line? Not there in most cases, hence friends with benefits. Too little attachement to be in love, but too much to be ‘just friends.’ But, you say, what about the white elephant, sex?

You could turn everything around and look at it as dealing and refering to sex. Friends niether have sex, nor want to have sex with each other. (Fantasizing about it is on a case by case basis.) Friends with benefits have sex, but aren’t magically in love with each other. Or more acurately accept that it’s nice when you can get it, but you’re not fussed about being the only one. Then you have the ‘couple’ or ‘partners’ that are in love. Meaning they have sex, exclusively (for the most part), and are totally jazzed about that. I have to ask then, what about our new division between having sex, and making love?

Yes, we talk about seperating love and sex. So we can hookup without any emotional attachment what so ever, and that’s slightly different than friends with benefits because at least they care about each other to a degree, and are willing to talk to each other with the lights on, and use more words than ‘oh’ and ‘god.’ So now we have ‘in love’, and we have ‘making love.’ I suppose it would be people in love make love. But it’s pretty arogant to say that you can make something you don’t understand and can’t explain. Maybe it’s a nice way of saying banging my wife, or maybe it’s really a seperate meaning. I’ll have to refer this matter to couples who are ‘in love’ and ‘make love’ to try and sort out.

It seems a conclusion ought to be coming soon, I apologize for the pun, but I can’t help myself. What I know is that I love a few people, and that love is strong and grows quickly. If I had to define love it would be: I will do anything you need at three o’clock in the morning, no questions asked. I see this as covering a lot of things, from my dog just died I need a hug, to my dog just died and for some reason it made me horny. The problem is that I don’t know what ‘in love’ is in that context, and it seems to get me into trouble. I hate the ‘I like you’ precursor to will you go out/hookup/date me question. We could be honest and say, ‘I think I could love you forever in a romantic physical way, want to hang out and see?’ Wouldn’t that be easier than wondering around linguistic wastelands trying to decypher a text message that turned out to be a typo. ‘I like you, as a friend,’ ‘I like that shirt on you,’ ‘I like that shirt off of you.’ But it’s not so, we just can’t stand that word, love.

I’ve never seen any word cause more stir than love. I think I could drop the word ‘cunt’ around a group of women and recieve less suprise and shock than spring the word love on one of them unexpectedly. (I hate the word ‘cunt’ with a passion, in case you needed to know.) That sad look in their eyes, the oh, poor boy, you are deluded but I don’t want to say it that way. The ‘L’ word seems to divide us so quickly, even though we’re okay with it in other circumstances. I could ramble and rant for much longer, but I’ll wrap up instead. We are afraid of love, and we are afraid of what it means to love. We’ve lost our way. When there are thousands of ways to qualify what I mean when I say love, there’s something wrong with our understanding of it. It seems to me that if you can’t define love, you don’t get to decide when it’s used improprerly. What if we all just talked openly about it instead of hiding behind different phrases designed to cloud the message?

You can see why I’ll most likely grow old with cats, but maybe I’ll feel okay about that once erectile dysfunction settles in.

I was talking with a friend, and I realized that we are our secrets. If you look at it from an existential point of view, the thing that we use to define ourselves is what separates us from everyone else; especially in a milieu where so very little separates us anymore. The things that are entirely our own are those things that we do not share with anyone else. We call it our inner lives, our self, our person or soul. Sharing secrets is like sharing the very essence of who we are. If we are in denial about our existential existence, then the violation of a secret is like an instant bath in the instability of existential isolation. At once it is the realization that we are alone because we have this secret, and then the treachery at being exposed in such a way, naked and isolated. This a rough idea at best, but it was a strong feeling that I had. The results however was a new perspective on the revolution against duality, and the progress toward enlightenment.

It became a little clearer to me how the self is created and indicated to us. Our very knowledge may in a way work against us, creating this world of pain that we endure daily. In our zeal to be seperate, to be a self, we horde things unto ourselves, just us and not anyone else. Perhaps it is most viceral with our homes, the feeling that someone was among our place of self, and worse took things from that place of self. The reaction seems to be universal. What’s more, once that violation occurs, it seems as though we have lost our self, lost the thing that made us feel separate. I think this is where the paths of existentialism and zen tend to diverge for me. At least, in that I have not seen them merge. Isolation is our natural state, and so to feel that we have lost that is somehow impossible, and against our path toward authentic action. Yet, to attain enlightenment it would be a positive step. Letting go of attachments and cravings.

Perhaps they are one in the same. Taking of our secrets, the violation of the boundary we have set out as self makes us feel our own true isolation. We have created a link, an anchor to the world through these physical structures, and to the people that inhabit them. When we are forced to see how variable and inconsistent that boundary can be, we revert to a state of existential realization, that we are far more separate and alone than we thought. The comfortable barrier that we have created is in fact an illusion in our attempt to delude ourselves from the reality of death, of ending.

So also it is a step toward releasing the self. Though we usually react by gripping even more tightly to the things that we have used to create a self. Physical objects are replaced, and security systems installed. But the taking of a secret is physical. My friend used the phrase “physically violated.” It’s a visceral feeling because it is the removal of the self by a forcible measure. But it can be used as a method for seeing the illusions of the self through these horded secrets, that these really are not a thing in themselves, but our attempt to be separate from everyone else.

The divergence however is even more apparent the more that I think about it. To take a path toward authenticity, I would accept my self in isolation, but to step toward enlightenment, I would look toward the removal of this illusion. It is odd to me that at times these two idea are synchronous, though now that I feel a little bit closer toward understanding the illusion of the self, they are so divergent as to cause me even greater confusion. It may of course be that one or the other, or lamentably both, are incorrect at best, and delusional at worst. But these things are often the province of thought and reason which are the worst offenders in this line of inquiry.

I suppose the most visceral part for me is that I horde my short list of secrets very tightly. I cannot imagine the violation of them. So much that I will freely give away what others might think secret. All is a rouse to hold on even more tightly to my self. That was the greatest understanding that I gained from this little experience. I can feel that tightness in me even now. Lastly, I began to wonder, what of the person that I tell all my secrets to? Is that a healthy step, a positive growth. Or perhaps is that the greatest secret of all? (And also the most hypocritical seeing as I’m about to post this into public space, but the literary whore in me won the day.)