I’m not sure how to write about this, but there was a period where, a few years back, I was sure I would die any day. It’s not that I was depressed or suicidal or anything remotely close to that, any fixation on the macabre, etc. But it was an unshakeable certainty day-to-day that my existence would simply not continue: and not just in its current form, but at all. I was literally living every day like it was my last, except I had no terminal illness.
It may have had something to do with the ritual work I was engaging it at the time. Radically eliminating artifacts of personal history: photos, journals, sketchbooks, yearbooks, important documents. I sat up nights ritually disassembling these objects, with pangs of sadness and loss for each one, and simultaneously, freedom. Freedom from fixed views of the self one carries along like luggage whose only use is to keep us perpetually anchored to what we once were, how we once saw ourselves.
Through this process of active self-loss, I stripped away attitudes, beliefs, ideas about myself that I didn’t know I had, and once I was rid of them, couldn’t remember ever having clung to. And it, I guess, is small wonder that some paranoid part of myself, some small egoic consciousness, felt actively threatened by these theurgic rituals, throwing me into a state of perpetual anxiety as those old energies were released and transfigured – and eventually re-integrated on a more fundamental level.
These days, those feelings of imminent physical death have departed. I find myself more grounded, more practical, more level, more balanced and more activated to do and to be what I’ve always been in a basic way. Symptoms seem to include an increased ability to express myself, negotiate the execution of my will in the world, amidst an environment of co-conscious beings. It is a good place, knowing why you’re here, what you’re doing and having a strong sense, at least, of the steps involved towards actualizing my purpose as a human being. Each act, when I’m able to dwell at and act from the center (which itself is a kind of emptiness, a well available for whatever use is demanded of it), becomes an act of wonder as the universe reveals itself in beauty and joy. So I guess my point is, it does get better. The steps are different for everybody, the spells and rituals ought to shift to suit the user. But there is a point, and its important when you reach one of those vistas where you’re able to look out on the plain below and the path you took to get from here to there, that you plant a flag or mark the trail. Mark the trail.
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30 Comments
So…is this related to the “stopping suffering” thing?
I think I can relate to this. Last year, I travelled all over the country and had all these adventures including hitch hiking across alaska, staying in homeless shelters, standing in soup lines, living with hobos, making graffiti art, doing DMT, dumpster diving, making wine, falling in love…
anyway, now I am back in Madison, WI. As I tune into my surroundings, I can feel how I have changed.
Yes, its related to that
I think I understand it now.
not the most auspicious time to fall in love with a girl while going through this though….
You just have to live life fully while it’s standing in front of you and not try to cling to it after its gone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zXLZNaf5t8
This is what I think it is, the stopping suffering thing: Suffering is passive. Its something that happens to you. Then you got on this self mastery kick and became active. You activated your power chakra, started breathing with your diaphragm, improved your posture,became more manually dexterous, Gave up on conspiracy theories.
This are all related to personal power. Up to the point of becoming consciously active and thus ending suffering your personal history had been passively acquired.
Its all based on things you didn’t actively choose. The role society had molded you into up to that point, childhood “memories” that are more like ancedotes relatives told you about yourself that became a personal identity.
So these things needed to be shed.
I think you’re on the right track, especially about the nothing of suffering – as I’ve been defining it – being a passive thing which “happens to you.” It’s not to say that I don’t ever feel bad, have down days or go through difficult passages in my life, but my interactions with those times has changed on a radical level.
Shedding some of these things though, standing in the light of your own choice and ability, realizing that it’s up to you, that no one is necessarily looking out for you specifically and no one is going to pave the way for you – well that can appear pretty daunting at times. And you cling to what? The struggle? The goal? What’s the right way to actively mold your self a new identity while remaining conscious of those around you who may hold on to this or that image of who and what you are?
“What’s the right way to actively mold your self a new identity while remaining conscious of those around you who may hold on to this or that image of who and what you are?”
I think it helps to be more assertive. I think your analogy of the Bazaar is apt. Lots of give and take in a chaotic way that gives everyone more or less what they need.
Relatives are the worst though in terms of having you pidgin holed.
I went through a period of about a year where I had a constant feeling of death-like anxiety. it wasn’t attached to any particular circumstance, just a sense of being completely unmoored to anything like a stable ground. I’m pretty sure it was related to ongoing mindfulness practice, where you progressively dismantle all the faulty assumptions about your sensory experience. eventually it’s just like ripping away your own sense of being a stable entity, which is kinda like dying, I guess.
these days, my experiments with self loss are a bit less visceral, but I do still get the bouts of nausea or panic. mostly it’s about treating the sensory projections of the nervous system as sensory projections, not the actual self. everything you experience as the ’self’ is just an image held before the mind, including the sense of the body, which is just the image of a body, not an actual body.
it’s kind of like going to the movies and not being able to distinguish yourself from the main character in the film. even if the movie happens to be about you and starring you, it’s still just a film, and not your actual, existential, being.
Yes, this is very much what I’m getting at – especially in relation to my latest thing on sensory illusion in aviation.
Thanks Zac, great comments and nice to make contact again after all this time. This metaphor is particularly apt given my focus on drama, the actor and the observer these days.
This relates directly to the dream I just described about being questioned over these “stolen camaros”
Yes Ted, I think you’re exactly right. Am working on that lately and finding it challenging to stand up unquestionably in support of my own needs and desires without feeling guilty or wrong somehow for doing so, or like I’m somehow pushing someone else into something…
Yeah, in the real world of human-to-human trade, no one really ends up making a killing with ridiculous out-of-control profit margins…
I’m glad I posted about this – it’s something I’ve carried around for a while without airing to anyone else and there’s a value in doing so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_naming_and_launching
“Openings to the water I stopped;
I searched for cracks and the wanting parts I fixed:
Three sari of bitumen I poured over the outside;
To the gods I caused oxen to be sacrificed.”
And:
Not that I think Crowley is all that or anything, but the idea behind “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is about that type of assertiveness. If everyone did what they wanted to do the World would be a better place.
I think rather than “power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely” its more the flipside.
Giving away ones power corrupts. The more people give away more and more of their power to fewer and fewer people the more corrupted things get.
I don’t think this is a permanent thing though, or that there is “no self.”
So many of these terms get thrown around and everyone seems to use them in different ways-self, ego, false self, true self, higher self, one self, no self.
For my own purposes I am going with the model that there is a type of false self, based on passively aquired social construction and misperceptions of reality, call it the ego.
I kind of like the Jungian idea of the process of individuation.
It seems to me that some people think that everyone is basically just one person, which is “the self” or God and that any sense of a separate individual identity is a delusion that needs to be overcome through meditation or whatever.
I tend to think that whereas that may be true, that there is an overall purpose behind us here on Earth, having these delusions of having separate identities.
So as far as permanently shedding this, that’s not my goal. In my experience, it feels more to me like there are layers of identity and that the outer superficial ones are the most crusty and restrictive and based on false information, but that the deeper layers are more integrative and freeing.
Some how connected to this is desire I have to live more present in my body and in the present moment. It also feels Like I am creating my best self and also following a blue print partly, like its not like I am reinventing the wheel, but more like going from an acorn to a tree, without knowing ahead of time I was supposed to become a tree. But as I get there it feels familair. It doesn’t feel like I am just making up some identity.
Ted, I love this. This idea has been rolling around in my head quite recently, but I like the way you’ve worded it.
Tim, great post. I fantasize about eliminating elements of my past, cutting the anchor line to many things. But while I fantasize, you act. That’s courageous, and I wonder if I have the guts to act as well…
And since we’re admitting death-anxieties, I’ve been having a recent existential crisis involving death-by-car-crash. Nothing significant has brought this on, but I suddenly daydream or have abrupt thoughts about dying in a violent collision. It doesn’t frighten me, anymore than a bloody end would normally frighten a person, but it does make me painfully aware of my own existence and its inevitable end. It’s almost like Death does not surprise me anymore. Like, I expect it, even though I don’t welcome it. But I’m 27. Why should I expect Death? This makes me a little nervous. Sorry for rambling…
Right, my own experience checks out with your description: it’s not that I’m just willy-nilly picking out things to be into and saying “I’m this!” or “I’m that! This is my new identity!” Although, on some level, I think we do have that freedom – but I don’t fully jive with the likes of somebody like Bandler who said that we could just go make up a false past and believe that too (although most people partly do that unconsciously – deciding that something happened exactly this way when that’s partly just their interpretation).
If my body and mind are in some sense illusory, I’m okay with that for right now and I guess want to make the most of that illusion while its available to me!
From:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070708120...stone.com/articles/charlatn/magus.htm
Aaron,
Thanks. Your car thing kind of reminds me I had some type of neurosis from flipping my SUV on black ice. It made me very leery of driving either over 55 or on snow, for a while.
I think it was just my ego freaking out about how not in control I am of protecting my life while in a car. So what I did is stop wearing my seat belt. It didn’t totally solve it but it helped me realize that there is no way to be totally safe nor in control outside of giving up driving. It was a rational fear I had but one that I coudn’t allow to control me.
I think the human form is holy too, even if its an illusion.
Its easy for me to see beautiful graceful women embodying the “divine feminine” and being like goddesses. But then as I get to know them I realize they are only human also.
So I think its like that for everybody.
Edward Lighthart, amnesiac, wanders out of Seattle’s Discovery Park
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009694070_johndoe20m.html
That story piqued my interest so I tracked down some updates-his sister kicked him out of her house after he lived there a year without working or paying rent and he had recently gotten kicked out of Canada for free loading social sevices. (interestingly I recently talked to a Homeless man in Seattle that got kicked out of vancouver for the same reason)
I found this comment on an article:
“I had to log in becuase I’ve had a whole bunch of my friends tell me this guy’s been ripping off a story that was just published by a guy named Heath Sommer. In this guys book, the main character waskes up on a park bench, money stuffed in his sock, and has amnesia. I checked it out myself. the Book is called The Manufactured Identity, and the first chapter is the EXACT same story as Seattle John Doe…very interesting …”
Do you have the original link from that article?
I can’t find it, but heres the prologue to the book though:
http://themanufacturedidentity.com/
It seems like all the people who knew him say he is an ass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7YuMYynN8A&NR=1
I think what it is with this guy is that it was sort of a lie and sort of true. It was true that he ended up homeless in Seattle and not sure why. He was this well educated well travelled guy asking himself “what the hell happened to my life? Who am I?”
He sought a fresh start So he concocted this amnesia story and played it up like a character actor, drawing from real emotions and real events from his life.
That’s why he was so believable. Plus he’s a smart guy.
Interestingly, I was homeless in Seattle around this same time, asking some of the same questions, except I wasn’t really depressed about it. I was having an adventure. I had just hitch hiked across Alaska and taken a Ferry down the inside passage after leaving Anchorage two weeks earlier with less than $200 cash.
I like the concept – why shouldn’t people be allowed to do this? These interview quotes with him saying that its so horrible to lose your identity… why? What’s horrible about being allowed to make a fresh start?
You should be allowed to do it. Its just that he was being a con artist. Which is fine too, except that he couldn’t pull it off.
I have thought about faking my death and getting a fake id before in order totally start over.
But the thing is I do have friends and family that I care about and that care about me.
I think years ago this was easier to do. Possibly people did it all the time by moving to another country or even just moving west to another state or to the frontier.
Yeah, honestly, its probably not as hard as all that.
I like the idea of there being some kind of “holy exception” for people who want to opt out of all this bullshit. Like ’social bankruptcy’ or something, witness relocation for people who’ve witnessed how full of shit the world or the system or whatever can be -
I have a friend who has a friend who is this millionaire peace activist dude who went to India and followed the path of Ghandi on foot and burned his passport at Ghandi’s grave and declared himself a free man.
The Indian Government arrested him but then released him said he was committing a violation but not an offense and was free to do what he wanted.
This guy:
http://freeofstate.org/new/?p=7526
I’m trying to track down the link, but there was a lawyer, Puerto Rican by birth, I believe who legally renounced his American citizenship before a state department rep, thus reverting him back to Puerto Rican citizenship only. Except, there’s no such thing as Puerto Rican citizenship outside of and apart from American – and he did it, at least in part, to highlight that fact. Great story! Will try to find his name and info and include it here…
Here we go! The first person to be granted Puerto Rican citizenship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Mari_Bras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_citizenship
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