Relatio

I’m struggling to relate consistently, effectively, to myself. I’m questioning my motives which seem to shift in alignment with my general mental disposition.

Read: when I’m down, I seek externally (sex; time; attention, but also rich food; Netflix) to buoy. To quote Heath Ledger as The Joker, “I’m like a dog chasing cars – I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one.” To take that one step further: neither the dog nor the car would, to my mind, be served by the catching. It’s a confusion, a conflict, of paradigms.

This jittery awareness of awareness and constant drilling into motivation and perspective is counterpointed by egoic posturing and narrative construction.

I feel like I’m living numerous overlapping realities. It’s getting difficult to hold a light conversation when I’m in the weeds and struggle to optimise my state for connection with the other.

So I won’t. I’ll just turtle for a while.

Eurgh

“I’m sad not just because the ocean reclaimed my sandcastle, but because it showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was a construct of hope and fantasy.

“And I can cry about the loss of the sandcastle itself, but the more mature thing to do seems to be lamenting that I was building sandcastles at all.”

Back in July…

Step it up, blitz ‘em with love. I may fail, but better to shoot for love than wallow in shit. A moonshot seems an OK way to die. The crowd thins out and the air grows rarified; I’ll see the stars unadulterated before my lungs collapse. Sounds beautiful to me.

…And where I am in October

Hahahaha, dude, I intend to live simply and without all this addiction to drama. As Antolini said in Catcher: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”.

I’m going to make some ham and cheese on toast.

Which cape?

I long believed that, sooner or later, my position as Superman-among-the-clouds would be formally acknowledged and applauded.

As it turns out there is a deep and abiding (so far) peace, a profound filling up and out, in assuming the mantle of my imperfect, fated, vulnerable humanity.

I feared that unless I offered everything to everyone, I would be worth nothing to anyone. I never believed for a second that it might be enough to be not a boy superhero, but simply a man.

A man. Rare, imperfect, fallible.

And then to collapse the angels and demons of the world into the rare, imperfect, fallible beings we are, and accept us all as splinters of the human condition.

I love you guys. It’s all that’s left, and the only thing that makes any sense whatsoever.

Facing the Dragon

I am reading Facing the Dragon by Robert L. Moore.  It is about confronting personal and spiritual grandiosity, and it is blowing my mind.  But I’m not going to give you a book report.  I’m going to talk about me – which is fitting because the book is all about narcissism.

I have learned some things about myself during my intense study since things went south with my ex wife.  One of them has been emerging in the last month around my own narcissistic drives and what my moment-to-moment motivation is.  This book is blowing the doors wide open on it.  Here we go.

We all have a God complex.  We are all narcissistic.  In contemporary Western culture, God is dead and we have a grey sludge of piss-weak, new age spiritual nonsense in lieu of a wonderful, terrifying, omnipotent transpersonal other.

And it is fucking killing us.

We seek the soap box, our time in the sun, to be inflated by adoration and, really, deification.  We deify each other, too.  Put our partners on pedestals.  Our priests.  Our friends.  Here’s the rub: humans cannot reliably or sustainably hold this sort of energy.  We know we’re not God (no matter how much we’re told, or would like to believe it) and so have a secret shame that causes us to act out pathologically when we are over-inflated with God energy.  Or we develop depression to anchor us to the ground so we don’t float away.  Or (Moore’s words) we engage in masturbation marathons to remember our humanity.  Or, if we don’t get enough energy, we circle the drain in apathy.  This God energy is the breath of life.  We do need a constant and reliable supply to live to our fullest potential.  The amount we can hold and manage is personal to the individual, but if we hold our optimal then we live as awesome beings, Moore says.

The only way to achieve a balanced supply, posits Moore, the only way, is to engineer and maintain an optimised, strong connection to a transpersonal divinity (aka God), and give all glory to him.  We take the adoration and pass it up the chain.  It’s his anyway.

Personally, I have realised that to offset my crippling human condition (abject fear and denial that one day I will die, low self esteem, poor self image, etc. – nothing unique to me) I have capitalised on my God-given gifts of intelligence and sensitivity, and optimised my methods of attaining adoration from other humans.  Particularly women – I’m better at this with women, having chased their approval and adoration for much longer given men haven’t made a lot of sense to me with my father dying when I was 10.  I have then been inflated to the point where I struggle to hold the energy and because I can’t manage the inflation, I act poorly.  Unpredictably.  I withdraw, because the energy is too great.  And then I crash.  It’s like Icarus learning to fly.  I’m up in the clouds then a trainwreck in a tree in quick succession, repeat, repeat.

And I’m going to say it.  While I truly believe in God and his splendour and awesome potency, I have also spent many years drinking the Koolade.  I have felt at times not just that I am simply a shard of the divine (like everyone else) but rather that I am “more” God than the next person.  It has helped mask my pathologies and shadow.  It has played its part in destroying all of my previous relationships, and numerous friendships.

So, I am dusting off the cobwebs and starting to relearn how to pray.  And it’s highlighting that I lack humility.  I struggle to speak to God with the respect and awe befitting our relative positions.  I am overfamiliar.  It’s awkward.  It feels strange.  He is humouring me (I haven’t been hit by a lightning bolt yet) as I pass along my thanks for everything I have and am in unfamiliar phrases with fraudulent forelock-tugging while I ask for the strength and guidance to be truly humbled to his splendour.

It might just be that I have found religion again, against all odds.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot

C’est la vie

Fuck me but protracted celibacy coupled with a long night of raunch dreams makes for a heady brew over breakfast.

The situation would be highly comical, if only I didn’t take the absence of a sexual other so damn seriously.

Nah fuck that its pretty funny. We’re generally a funny breed, we humans. This whole drama becomes ridiculous to the point of hilarity when I remember it’s just cheek-to-cheek dancing with the hurricane.

“Ashes work,” Roberts Bly calls it in Iron John. Ashes work. And so it is. As a society we have lost our appreciation of the vital importance and value of ashes work. I’m slowly coming around to the understanding that (wait for it, big reveal…) I’m just the same as everyone else. No more special. No less a manifestation of the divine spark. And this spiritual-/ developmental-/ psychological-/ status-derived-/ materialism that I have (subtly or overtly) used to elevate myself over others, or elevate others over me, are just flip sides of the same coin of fabricated nonsense the exact shape and size of my internal imbalance, projected onto life’s geography.

I believe I have lived in fear that if I wasn’t special then beneath that veneer would be nothing, nothing at all. As it turns out, I was wrong. Beneath it is the primordial soup of God’s love, made manifest by the hair and skin and teeth of organic biology. The muck we have strived our entire history to abstract ourselves from is actually ambrosia.

This is not a call to pre-developed hedonism. Rather it’s a transcendent, expanded moral horizon where hedonism is understood as a pathology born of unconscious drives, and when owned in this way allows you to relate deeply without compromise. “Know thyself” said JC (and every other guru). I have been labouring under the misapprehension that this meant to know my quirks and foibles, values and psychological tics. That’s like trying to memorise every book ever written. Existence is far more elegant than that. Rather it’s a reading of every book you encounter until you realise, having consumed “enough” theory, that the answer is something deeper. Like trying to find an elephant with a microscope, our true nature is the context of our experience.

We are being, lived as humans. Not humans being or human beings.

Well, shit. I didn’t expect a couple of fuck dreams to get me to that. See how funny all this is? I can’t help but laugh. Still horny though 😉

Manifesto of Relating (first ed., subject to revision)

“I miss you.  Do you want to be friends again?  If so, would and could things be different?  Would you work with me to sort out what is my pathology and what is yours, such that we are both stronger and better able to relate to each other and everyone else appropriately?  This would involve a sincere desire to develop and grow for our own and everyone’s sake, a lot of honesty and probably a therapist each.

“I know I ask a lot.  In fact, I ask everything of you.  You know that I also offer everything of me.  There is no rush, and whatever you decide, know that I love you now and always.”

…And we find it again

And it is beautiful each time. The lift and the fall. It’s all poetry. And when we click, and when we snap. And the richness beneath the superficial lust and desire. That bedrock of openness that can only be called spiritual. How when we go deep enough we rediscover our true self within another. And how we confuse them for a key, instead of a mirror.