Also I am considering taking another extended computer-retreat (as in, retreat from the fucking computer), as I did around this time last year. I would not begin this right now, but soon. Stupidly, it only just occurred to me today that this is the season when the worst of the Bad Thing occurred (or it has occurred to me before and I've only forgotten it). The similar sights & sounds, smells in the air all combine into an icky tincture that fills me on the sly with a frenetic, angry energy that would be better used as fuel to drive honest work than to swim in circles on the interwebs.
---
Misc. thoughts from the past couple days:
1) Sometimes the right way out of a bad pattern is just to do something--anything--different. Have an opposite day. When the spirit says "GO"... maybe dig in your heels, suspiciously, and say "No."
Unless that's what you always do. Then you should do something different.... er... consistent. :-)
2) If you were ever religious, you were actually God that entire time.
I mean... let us for our purposes here define "God" as a being that offers you psychic strength, succor, and increased verve, under certain prescribed conditions.
Given that:
A) There is no scientific evidence to suggest that God or any other such being actually exists as a spiritual entity outside the imagination of human beings.
and
B) You did subjectively feel the "presence" and comfort of God, in your mind, without the aid of any foreign substance, and you did receive the aforementioned psychological benefits.
...then
C) Your mind itself possesses (or possessed) the capacity to "simulate" the effects of "God" under certain conditions.
Furthermore we observe that this potential can be locked and unlocked in the same individual.
What, precisely, is the key? Is it just a set of personal behaviors? The right combination and you're back in? Or is it dependent on environmental factors that are not within the individual's power to control?
Not a new idea or anything. It's been on my mind for years and it has been on our collective mind for centuries. But I haven't actually tried very hard at tinkering with it in my personal life, as least not with sustained effort. So I've been doing some conscious research into other people's attempts. And now I'm trying out a few things of my own fabrication. Which I will never again mention if they are all failures, of course.
3) Along the same lines. Is it possible to simulate belief in God effectively* without also simulating the promise of heaven or some other form of continuation or non-obliterational endgame?
Furthermore, is the distinction (between the presence of God and the promise of heaven) actually even important, in the practical sense? I am thinking it might not be, with the right behavior set. But I don't know.
This looks like a high-flown runaround, an empty exercise in bullcrap, I'm sure. Don't mistake me for a purist, though, or a snob. If I were personally able to approximate this end through easier/conventional means (I have tried--long story), I would no longer waste my time on the question of how to live without crutches. The idea would still intrigue me, I admit... the notion is a pretty one. But I think I've reached the point at which one recognizes--in this case, with a jolt--how vital it is simply to get better, stat.
Speaking of pain...
Earlier this year I was hospitalized for an emergency body-part failure and surgery. It's not really important what failed, just that I'd be dead right now if it weren't for modern medicine (I'd have died already as a kid for similar reasons, like so many of us, so now I'm doubly not-even-supposed-to-be-here-today).
Dante's lament
Anyhow, in the hospital I found out that I don't respond to morphine (this isn't very unusual; I just found it an interesting experience to go through); it doesn't actually decrease pain whatsoever for me, just makes my skin crawl and my already-rock-bottom BP drop off a cliff. For reasons I don't understand at all, I do respond well to hydromorphone, though (Dilaudid). I'd never taken anything like that before, so I was shocked when the injection actually removed all my pain--not just the physical, but the psychic pain as well.
My first thought was "So this is why people do heroin..."
My second was "So that's how much I carry around, all the time."
It wasn't until the omni-present burden was lifted momentarily from my back that I realized I am not just a wuss, that it really weighs a fucking fuck-ton.
Man, that was a shining hour--one I'll remember for the rest of my life.
The next dose wasn't so powerful. And the third barely worked at all.
I mean, I don't wanna get all Terence McKenna on your asses here. A great many substances just aren't worth the risk and shouldn't be messed with (in my opinion as a callow watcher-of-many-dabblers). But the only answer to the "great question" is that life is comprised of a series of--ultimately--meaningless stimuli, a great many of them painful. And that pain is magnified according to the perceptual and analytic acuity of your noodle.
So.
Waste it in pain, or do what you gotta do and live.
---
Without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?
-St. Augustine, The City of God
---
*By that I mean to hack yourself into functioning as if you believed in a real God or god-substitute via conforming to a set of behaviors meant to approximate the benefits of religion/spirituality, while remaining actually unconvinced/non-believing, AND that this mimicked/approximated belief results in sustainable increases in joy, motivation, childlike/mindful contentment, as well as decreased negative affectivity. Apologies for the ungainly sentence. I am going to go eat a sandwich.
No comments:
Post a Comment