Recommended Listening: Arendal by Svaneborg Kardyb
One must win freedom by carving it out of the stone of our anxiety and fundamental aloneness and isolation. Just as Marduk created the Universe from the innards of Tiamat after slaying it in titanic battle, so too must we create a world, a life, a reality, through the slaying of the nemesis within ourselves and our preconditions. But there is no Marduk, no Tiamat, and no existence without anxiety or aloneness. And no universe or freedom without the act of slaying. Freedom is the act of slaying itself.
Wholeness is not something built or found but something excavated from under the ruins of damaged life. It is an artifact of your face before you were born. It is the inheritance which eclipses all earthly value.
The self is the aperture through which time is perceived and experienced. If you want to slow down time, you must enlarge the aperture. If you want to speed up time, you must enlarge the aperture. If you want to experience time as pregnant with meaning, the aperture must be so wide that you lose sight of its edges. Then will you wake and great the sun with a clear heart and fresh mind.
When you have been force fed and swallowed another person’s reality to survive, the only recourse is purgation and purification of yourself and your body of this alien reality. Swallowing another’s reality is what we shall call the primary epistemic injustice. It is injustice done to the very way we know ourselves and reality itself. There is no greater theft than taking someone’s right to know reality on its own terms.
The process of healing is fundamentally fighting about back against and alien and hostile reality that you were overwhelmed and overcome by. Wounding is always experienced as a defeat. And more often than not, it was a defeat in the way that gods smite and defeat the humans under their dominion. Healing is fighting for your own reality and winning because you finally have sufficient tools to do so. Those tools are the qualities and capacities within each human being that can only rightly be called divine.
Forgiveness comes in the morning quiet and snakes its way through the forest floor and canopies. Hold your breath and don’t blink otherwise you’ll miss it. It is very shy but knows how to find you if you still yourself and wait quietly as the new sun rises. Maybe others will never believe you actually saw it during those empty crimson hours. But you will tell the tale of its coming all the same.
There is no more tangled web that that of pain’s relationship to identity. In the absence of love and connection, pain is the most reliable attachment one can have. Pain is always present with you, it loves you, it nourishes you, and it promises to never abandon you in your hours of need. And just like any parent, it becomes the basis upon which you form a self of your own. It teaches you who you are and how to navigate reality. And just like any narcissistic parent, it demands your life be lived in service of its needs. The only way out is through a self that cuts the cord of pain as its primary act of being.
Two options: pretending you are safe in a broken world and hold tightly to your belief that you can transcend and overcome the reality of pain and anguish (which inevitably gives way to constantly feeling like you’re failing because pain and anguish are not things to be “overcome”) or confront the true horror of being in an unsafe environment and being powerless to change people and your material conditions into a safe environment full of safe people. The choice is ours. And the first choice is always a hollow one and the second is not much better. As with most things, the choice when given a false binary is always the unspoken third option. In this case, it is to choose to accept the hopelessness of your situation and free yourself to finally become an agent of history through crafting it in this present moment of here and now. This choice is in essence the choice sacrificing a conditioned self for a birth into being part of that which is all things.
The greatest power of the human being is the power of negation. Through it, we can act and become as god by using of the power of negation to extinguish existence itself. The human being’s greatest power of protection and self-preservation is through this power of negation. Namely, through using this power to negate reality itself and pretending and fantasizing that things are not what they are – that the world and reality are otherwise. When one is contemplating suicide, one at least admits that pain and suffering are real enough to demand a radical choice of self-negation. But when one is negating reality itself, choice has been seceded to that which we feel has ultimate power over us (i.e. something godlike). But real divinity lies in our ability to choose and no longer just negate. Then we know what is real and who we are – that which affirms and no longer negates. And this always comes after seeing the horror of our power to negate, that piece of god which lies in every consciousness.
Fear of aloneness is never just fear of being alone. It is primarily a fear of the recognition and acceptance that there is no safe connection for you anywhere in the universe. Hence why solitude is choosing to be in safe connection with yourself and isolation while feeling abandoned and isolated are the experience of forced disconnection from others due to their lack of safety or your unworthiness of connection. This is why the philosopher Plotinus described the journey of the soul back to Oneness is “the flight of the alone to the Alone”. All mystics and esoteric philosophers have fundamentally understood that the experience of transcendent Oneness is always the eradication of the belief that there is a single atom of this universe not connected to spirit and each other. When we are All, we are also totally alone and resting in aloneness and oneness at the same time.
You will never know how truly powerful you are and how much agency you have in this life until you embrace reality fully (which includes yourself completely) with all its horrors, contradictions, and beauty. How can you know yourself fully if you do not embrace and know reality? For you are reality itself. Where do you possibly find separation between “you” and “it”? The finest of blades cannot slide through the crack between you.
Khalil Gibran once said that pain is the shell enclosing our understanding. Rightly so and I would also say in his spirit that grief is the shell enclosing our indestructibility. Know your greatest pain and you shall know your greatest capacity for transcendence of that pain.
The most daring peak to scale in the healing is the dialectic of shame. We spend most of our energy trying to negate shame after already affirming its truth and reality as a divine judgment of the self made by mysterious and unseen gods. The most radical and daring move of all is to negate and reject the truth of shame as ever having been a reality in the first place. But who wants to admit that their life of pain and suffering has been lived based on a lie, even a divine one? No one and not I. But the greater pain, maybe the greatest of all, is to admit that you died within every breath based on a lie all the while that you lived. Furthermore, which of us have not known the mind of killing, deception, and delusion based on this lie? Which is worse: Torturing other beings or torturing yourself based on this lie? Either way, it turns us into monsters all the same. I would like one day to be human again. Perhaps we will catch each other’s gaze and smile knowingly once we are both back in the land of the living.
Pain is a great mountain of stone inside your being. Have you ever seen Haystack Rock off the coast of Oregon? This is what your pain is like. It is majestic and soaring and almost impossible to not focus on its behemoth presence out of awe and terror. It juts out of the sea as if it demands your attention and allegiance to its grandeur. It screams, “Bow before me and know you are but my lowly subject!” But keep your gaze and attention fixed on the ocean. It will dissolve even this titan someday and turn it to silt and peddles underneath your feet. Are you the stone or the ocean? You are both but who shall have dominion over your life is another story all together.
Healing is not the correcting of experience but the dissolving of the conditions of belief upon which that experience was given birth. Healing is always about the awakening from the delusion of separateness and the solidity of time and space within the linear progression of my human consciousness. The greatest healing is to realize there is nothing to heal from in the first place. As your experience was devoured in the sands of Saturn’s mouth, so was your body as well, fellow traveler.
When aggression and hatred wield the truth, there is no greater weapon of mass destruction. We become martyrs burned in the flames of truth by those with only the desire to kill, dominate, and escape their own pain. Trauma is always about the war for reality and control of who has control over the means of knowledge. And the only appropriate response for this epistemic injustice is ontological justice. Correction of corrupted knowledge must come from a new experience and way of being. Hatred and aggression wield pain as the truth. Compassion and liberation wield presence as the truth.
Torturers and abusers are actually abdicating their power to the abused – and this their greatest downfall and weakness. Nietzsche once spoke of those we are oppressed and marginalized will develop an ethics and morality where the pain and suffering of this oppression will become their greatest source of moral virtue and power over their oppressors. The meek shall inherit the earth. The rich man will never enter heaven because he will not fit through the eye of a needle. But what is most bizarre and shattering is to see that most of those who oppress and abuse are placing the entire edifice of their power in the hands of those they oppress by always needing and requiring something unspoken and mysterious from them, especially to the eyes and ears of those being harmed. Those who shatter shall be shattered once it is seen that their power and violence always emerge from their place of greatest vulnerability. Touch that place and it falls apart.
One of the greatest sources of shame and terror is the mind built upon scarcity. And who does not inherit this mind of scarcity when our entire capitalistic economic system and associated cultural and social forms are also built upon a mind of scarcity? Whatever your material conditions in your most vulnerable early moments will become the framework and structure of your mind. Your internal environment will be a reflection of your external environment. Create environments built upon violence, exploitation, and scarcity and you shall create minds that serve it faithfully. Create an environment and people at war with each and you will create people at war with themselves. Internalization is our greatest defense and most fervent wish for love and safety through self-destruction.
In the quiet recesses of my mind (perhaps yours too) there is a voice that whispers that it desires to never have been born. Socrates upon his death hinted that drinking hemlock and dying by suicide as a martyr for his principles and life of questioning and virtue was actually a cure for the disease called life. But in moments of great love and transcendence of my own limited mind, I have heard another voice whisper to me. It says that this desires to never have been born was never my feeling or wish in the first place. That it is the legacy of the experience of being hated and of those that wish you were never born. The most negating thoughts and feelings of life are almost always not my own. What better way for the mind and body to survive than to take that which is most destructive to us and to make it our own? When we set down that which was never ours, we can finally reach out to touch that which is and always has been our birthright: that we belong here. I belong here. You belong here.
To deceive myself or anyone else, somewhere within me must be the truth. And I can never know that within me is this truth, maybe even that I am this truth in a way, until I have known deception. How can I know that I am deceiving unless I first know what the truth is? But truth comes after the fact. Truth is always the end product of the lie. Truth depends on deception.
