joe.

Being enlightened is a heavy burden, you know.  I mean, everybody wants to know, and the instant you start to say something enlightened, all the attention swings over toward you.  Like a million watts (or so it seems) of spotlighting focuses on your ‘shy’ little ego and, loving attention, your ego barges into the spotlight all loud and obnoxious.  In a breath, the enlightenment is swept away. 

And then it is gone. 

It is gone so fast that even you do not know for sure that you ‘had it’.  It is only through permanent isolation that you ever get an inkling that you are, in fact, enlightened.  This may be why ascetic monks were so ascetic.  It kept others away.  It maintained isolation, denying attention to the voraciously attention-seeking ego.  But that just made them unhappy.  Worse, it defeated the purpose; the ego became the center of dark instead of bright attention.  The ego was still the center. 

So enlightenment becomes not a state of joy, but the opressively stuffy and overbearing presence of the ego, penetrated only by rare and faint breaths of joy, just to remind you that the air is nice—somewhere else. 

It happens at parties.  You feel a need to go off alone with your drink, onto a porch or patio away from the crowd.  The stars.  The lesser noise.  Something stirs, rises.  It begins to awaken, recovering from its deep sleep.  It is still, watching.  Present. 

And then someone joins you.  People do this almost instinctively.  They see one separating from the group, wandering off alone, and something in them detects the possibility of enlightenment emerging from its ego-imposed opression.  They are drawn to this in their soul.  But also, their own egos seek to dominate that emerging enlightenment.  Enlightenment anywhere is a threat to the ego everywhere. 

I do not know what may happen next.  I only know what has always happened everytime I have been there.  The ego reasserts itself, and reality—as we know it, through our egos—resumes its disinterested opression of the limitless.  Sometimes, if alcohol is being consumed for example, it takes the ego a few moments to regain control.  From the interim some evidences may be remembered of what else there might be beyond what the ego allows.  Finally, enlightenment is reinterred, stomped firmly down by the obnoxious ego, until some other random opportunity comes for it to emerge. 

But this I know; the limitless waits.  Eternally opressed and abused, it holds no grudges.  It asserts itself never.  It waits to be called, and it never fails to respond.  That call is going out always, from somewhere deep inside, where the ego cannot go.  The limitless is, really, all there is. 

I live on exactly every single cent that I make.  No wiggle room, no Certificates of Deposit, not even enough savings to pay for dinner at a fine restaurant. 

So it is perhaps symptomatic of something ominous that I just paid for an item on ebay an amount equal to dinner at a fine restaurant, for two, plus the cost of many drinks of really good Irish Whiskey, for two.  Plus the cost of a several snifters of B&B. 

I could so use a drink right now. 

Explaining how I reached this consumer climax would probably be just as dull as describing the climax itself, which is, like too many climaxes, turning out to be somewhat less than the foreplay had promised.  To be sure, some climaxes in my personal ancient history—like from the late 80′s—exceeded expectations, astoundingly so.  Those events…  or rather that one event, if I am to be honest, since only one comes to mind at the moment, came unbidden, had not been hoped for nor anticipated.  I had never for a moment suspected such ecstasy could come to me, or through me. 

So far this climax is not like that one. 

I pretend to be a photographer, much like I pretend to be a writer, though I do not even do the pretending very well.  Thus, I have acquired a number of cameras in the past, much like my acquisition of the paraphernalia of the writer; notebooks, then typewriters, and eventually word processors back when a word processor was actually a discreet physical object rather than merely expensive software on a disc.  Come to think of it now, that first word processor was about the same time as that unanticipated climax, too. 

Well anyway, in my fascination with photographs, I stumbled upon, and then viewed every single image in Sergei Chaparin’s photostream.  I was specifically impressed with this photo.  Considered in the context of Sergei’s huge photographic collection, that photo embodies some things from which I have both always fled, and always missed.  Affection.  Family.  A shared and remembered history.  It appears to me that what is behind his camera is profoundly kind and generous.  And that sparked something in the dry tinder of my desolation. 

As I have always done throughout my life when confronted with the nebulous world of soul and emotion, I focused instead on the gadgets.  As a little kid, I had a fascination, and an aptitude, for all things machinelike.  Gadgets are the manifestations of the ingenuity, the creativity, and even of the love that human beings have within themselves.  And as humans have always been confounding for me to relate to, the gadgets they made were for me the next best thing.  That camera in Sergei’s picture is, I think, a Rolleiflex 2.8f K7F (Type 1).  A gorgeous example of human ingenuity and craftsmanship.  That Rolleiflex was perfectly irresistible for me in the middle of that photograph which reminded me of something I could have become a long, long time ago; a humane and emotionally rich person.  Something which I now fear I may never become. 

The Rolleiflex is a Twin Lens Reflex camera.  I once had a TLR, though a cheap one by Kodak, when I was young and still not so far removed from life as I am now.  Sergei’s Rolleiflex reminded me of that younger me, and that time.  He is gone, and that time has passed.  But I didn’t try to find out where he went, nor did I try to undo the deceptions and evasions that he wrought during forty years of flight from his own humanity, a humanity similar to the one I longingly recognized in Sergei’s photography.  Instead I focused on something else—the camera. 

Trying to find an example on the Internet of an old Kodak camera shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought.  And until today, I could not find an example of the camera that I had in the late 1960′s.  I didn’t know it’s name; I wasn’t even sure it was a Kodak.  I needed a picture of it, and though Google was some help, revealing Kodak cameras which looked very similar to the one I had, I needed more.  The sentiment attached was very strong, so I was driven toward the only rescue available to me when inundated by emotions—obsession with the gadget involved.  Google had led me to ebay, and some images there of cameras.  I looked up examples similar to Sergei’s Rolleiflex.  Nice.  Expensive.  But the way of ebay, especially for me, is like a casino for a gambling addict.  Soon I had forgotten the little Kodak and all the associated bittersweet memories of my past failures to connect emotionally with life, and instead I was researching every type of old film camera.  TLR’s initially; Yashica-Mat 124G’s, Mamiya C330′s, all medium format cameras, yielding a 6×6 cm negative.  As a slave to my addiction, and to fear, I bid on a couple, losing in the last seconds of each auction. 

Impulse buying of anything that is more than thirty years old seems supremely ludicrous.  So, of course, it is extremely active on ebay.  By this time, the photo of Sergei and his brother represented to me not the hope of something longed for, but the disappointment of something I would never have.  And when hope for what is human is lost, the gadget becomes all. 

After closely watching the climaxes of dozens of auctions, and researching other more ‘interesting’ classic cameras, I finally bit, and bit hard.  I don’t know if it is gauche to reveal bidding strategies, but the amount I bid was more than twice the amount I paid for the camera which I finally won.  On ebay one sets a maximum bid, which is not usually the amount you pay.  Even though I bid over $300.00, the amount I paid was just a small increment over the next highest bidder, in this case $155.00.  The camera I got may or may not be worth what I paid, much less what I bid.  But at that moment, the diversion provided from reality was worth every cent I paid and every cent I bid, and then some. 

This is elementary for those who are selling, but a revelation for those of us who buy; people will buy anything, and the reasons have nothing to do with the item on sale, in this case a camera.  Purchasing the gadget is an excuse, the real objective is escape. 

I wasn’t participating in life, when I was 12, with my Kodak Brownie Starflex.  I was desperately trying to stop all those gorgeous, glorious, love-filled, light-filled moments from slipping irretrievably past.  In the Summers and the Winters and the Springs and the Falls of my youth, at the birthday celebrations of family members and friends, at Thanksgivings and Christmases and vacations and Boy Scout camp, I took hundreds of photographs.  And now they are all lost just like that elusive is-ness of being present within every moment, an intangible which I lamely sought to photograph instead of feel. 

The lens is an implacable eye, it tells us nothing.  Through it we see, if at all, darkly.  And through it we capture not a moment from the past, but rather, we capture something from somewhere else.  If we are really good, and really present in the moment and fully conscious, we might retrieve something invisible from the future and hold it hidden within the film, encoded within the visible image, decipherable only by that encounter toward which it was bound, where it was always meant to go, and there to touch a single human heart. 

Nothing. 

The imperative is to say ‘yes’ to life.  Accept now.  Embrace the present, whole heartedly, loving the precise quality of what is. 

Why do I do this?  Why am I stuck on this tune?  It is grating to my ego, torture to the little self that creates the artificial fantasy in which I exist.  He would much rather contemplate suicide, imagine some future of escape, wallow in the suggestion of perplexity that such an ‘untimely’ end might create among those around me.  Or, somewhat less drastically, he would love to get enmeshed in the depression he creates, the endless wailing, the never ending swell and fall of dread and despair that my journal has so tediously documented.  And it implies the end of this; no more familiar cyclical moodiness, the end of the illusion in which I have invested my whole life up to this point.  The end of him. 

Can I surrender all that?  Am I capable of that much surrender?  Can I endure the removal of the ‘core’ of me, the substance I have become?  Can I relinquish this fond little mottled clay sculpture to which I have been adding bit after bit for over fifty years, in the hopes of finally, one day, becoming something? 

Walk into the wilderness.  Leave the roads and paths behind.  Veer away, flee the light pollution, head into the night, find stars. 

I ask myself, “You want a revolution?  Want to change the world?”  I accuse myself, “You just want to talk about it.  Full of shit.” 

Well, I think, at least half of that’s OK; full is good.  Shit is not so good. 

“You wear your cowardice like a badge, you wallow in your cream and sugar existence like that is all there is.  And if you say so, then it will be.  But you know that is not what you really want.  There is an un-discardable kernel in you, and no matter how much you coat it thickly, pave it over, bury it under distraction—it can still be heard; you feel it.  It feels you.” 

“It is you.” 

Hm.  So, to survive, to go on as-is, denial is the only option.  And it has been denial all the way up until now.  A masquerade of living.  I have been pretending to be alive.  It doesn’t matter why, really, but it is probably because it all just scares me so much.  And it all waits for me.  And I either face it now, or at the end. 

But if I know all this, if I am aware of the denial, it cannot remain denial.  It becomes a willful lie. 

<Sigh>

It sucks to be me right now.  Either that, or it is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. 

Been rummaging in the archives again.  Shoot me. 

war

I am depressed.  The fresh-face and bright-eyes of youth have given way to hairy ears and bad skin.  My faith and optimism from another time is now dark doubt and cynicism.  I may have chosen incrementally to make it so, but I don’t like it.  The beautiful earth is more paved and more poisoned than when I came.  The vale and stream, mountain and forest where once I met the Spirit is inaccessible to me now.  The trees and rocks are still there.  The clear, cold streams still flow and the air, on good days, is still fresh and pure.  But the things I have learned in life have left me inconsolable even in the presence of the Spirit, even in the gentlest, most tender hollows of Spiritplace.

I am a lover.  As my beloved physical life deteriorates, soon to hang in ragged shreds, it thus reveals an invisible structure that never decays, which has always supported all that lives.  There is a memory of the pure, unsullied flesh, but everything tells me to let it go, that it is not the true object of my desire for it will one day be gone.  I love eternally, therefore the object of my love, once found, will be outside of time.  It will remain after these rocks and stones have ceased their song.  It will remain when this dear earth and all its blue beauty exists no more.

And so not only can I tolerate, but I can participate in all the follies that life presents, both those caused by me as well as those inflicted by others upon me, for they cannot obstruct my contact to what really matters.  There are no obstacles, only distractions.  I need to write this down, for in the face of the horrors in which I participate today, I need the reassurrance of these words. 

And the comments from that post.  (There once were comments!)

Is this depression?  I do not think it meets the clinical criteria for Major Depression, and besides, I am fairly suspicious of the validity of those criteria anyway.  I get up, move, approach things I hate (workplace), evade oncoming traffic when crossing the street, maintain vegetative functions, and resume an unsatisfying sleep without too much difficulty, nor a whole lot of drugs, either.

I suspect there may be some who feel now an urge to educate me about what depression is, and how it can manifest.  Thanks.  I appreciate your concern.  But (and I think this may be included in the aforementioned criteria), I don’t care.

Can I just be alone?  That is not really an option, you know.  Yeah, sure, there are in this and other cultures examples of the hermit, the solitary meditant, the mystic.  But drawing back from the ideal for a moment, and landing squarely in the middle of a dirty kitchen floor, with laundry to be done, a broken bike to fix and bills to pay, then such romantic vapors dissipate quite completely.

And being alone is not really what I want anyway; I just do not want to sacrifice conscious awareness of that which cannot be known, and I do not want to sever connection with that which cannot be found, both of which are prerequisite conditions for almost every ego-based interpersonal transaction.  And discounting and discarding such prerequisites tends to make others view one as ‘weird’ or in extreme cases, even as insane.  We relate as egos, it is required by friends, lovers, family members.  “Get in costume will you!  Stop being so lazy!  Stop being such a dolt!”

What are you, nuts?

It’s phony.  And we know it.  But we just shrug as if it doesn’t matter, and move on.    Maybe we think it is the best we can do.  And maybe it is.  That is truly tragic.  What I am and what you are is infinitely more than that psychological entity we call ego.  In reducing ourselves to that level as a prerequisite for relating, we lose almost everything.  Losses of that magnitude might well result in something that might qualify, according to our crass metrics, as depression.

So, it’s a bad day.  I am stuck between two untenables.  I don’t want to engage in the artificial pretense, don the mask, and play the game that costs so much—too much for me.  But I am also too afraid to disarm completely, drop the shields, the masks, and once and for all discard the ego.  A good day is when I play the game and everybody buys it, and I don’t care how much it costs; that is a ‘good’ day.  A bad day is when I know the truth, know how much it costs, and know how impenetrably terrified I am.

Today was a bad day.

I started to write something here.  I’m way over due.  But whenever I come back to this blog, I re-read so much, that days pass before I press a key on my keyboard, and weeks pass before I finish any hesitantly started entries.  In the weeks since I started to write this entry, I’ve read at least a couple books-worth of my own writing in this blog.  I don’t think it is healthy to re-read oneself, just as mind and ego are unhealthy places in which to dwell.  But I never made any of my lovers use a rubber; I don’t do ‘healthy’ well. 

In the endless maze of revisiting ten years of my own mind—from which I have miraculously returned—I found something that said better exactly what I had half-started to write.  It seems I haven’t made much progress in eight years.  I wrote this in September of 2002:

castle keep

I’m afraid of you people.  Don’t you know that?  No.  How could you?  I think I hide it pretty well, and I almost never admit it.  In fact, most of the time I deny it, even when nobody’s asking.  Just by being whole, functioning human beings, you scare me.  And even if you are not whole and functioning, you still look like you are to me, so you still scare me.  If you reveal that you care, that you’ve invested even a pennie’s worth of emotion in me, then you scare me more.  How am I supposed to handle what you’ve given me?  How am I supposed to give you anything back?—or maybe I am not supposed to treat it like an exchange, or am I?  And if you are an authority figure, if you’re a cop, or a boss, or bigger than me, or more scared than me, or as angry as me, then I’m going to start out so terrified that I’m going to have to hate you just to hold myself together. 

And if you never notice the panic that I’m in, and never see the hysteria that I hide inside, and if you treat me like the whole and functioning human being I pretend to be, instead of the trembling, quaking, crumbling, sandcastle that I am, then I’ll try and make you go away.  I can’t disintergrate, I just can’t.  So I’ll try and make you go away, even though I don’t want to, because I don’t know what else to do. 

I’m sorry. 

Where to go now?  One wonders, when tied to the bow of a ship, like a giant tanker moving swiftly through the swelling sea, things like “What direction am I going?” or, “What port will I see next?” or, “Will they inadvertently plow through something floating in the sea, some debris insignificant against the steel hull but terribly significant against my tiny, tender, un-steel-like form, thereby reducing me to a smear of red and pink on the rusted hull?” 

Where to go now? 

More immediately, and with a somewhat less expansive scope, one instead wonders how to escape the overwhelming rush of sea into one’s face.  One wonders how to breathe.  One sees one’s life gurgling by in the tiny little reflective universes that are the bubbles all about as one plunges into and out of and into again the relentless sea.  That is where I find myself now; quite overwhelmed, quite helpless.  Quite afraid. 

A moment ago, I sat upright on the edge of my chair, un-reclined, with back straight, in a proper typing posture for the first time this year.  It was a position I adopted every day when I wrote a journal faithfully, a position my now worn-out chair is all but incapable of maintaining, it has been reclined for so long.  That moment was one of those reflective bubbles of my past life, long lost, passing before my eyes. 

There has been progress, though it chills me to admit it.  My question of a moment ago, “Where to go now?” is just what I imagine the sailor about to be keel-hauled would ask himself right after being pushed off the front of the ship, as he bobs and chokes near the crest of the plunging bow before being dragged under.  I, like he, am closer now to nothing.  Nothing is where I need to go.  I have a book by Ayya Khema, the title of which captures what I am trying to say; Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, Meditations on the Buddhist path.  Presence—consciousness beyond form—is the goal.  And ego appears to be the enemy.  So writing is a poor crutch to help me on my pilgrimage.  Like eating chocolate to lose weight. 

But that is consistent, the incongruity, I mean.  I alternate (when not writing, which is all the time lately) between listening to recordings of Eckhart Tolle, and watching porn.  One encourages me to be conscious, present in the moment, and say, “Yes”. The other is pictures of porn stars saying, “Yes”, discourages consciousness, and facilitates escape from the moment. It seems ludicrous that porn and Tolle are in the same sentence, but characterized as diametrically opposed, which they are, I can’t help but see this conflict—this manic switching from one to the other and back again—as making perfect sense.  One is presence, the other is escape.  One is awareness, the other is unconsciousness.  One offers freedom from form, the other is obsession with form.  And while there are some truly wonderful forms visible in porn, there is a whole lot of really bad porn out there.  I know; I’ve been looking. 

I’ll spare you the pearls that come from the naked boys, and instead share with you the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle:  “The purpose of life is to die before you die.”  Now, relax your definitions a bit, and try to understand.  There is a difference between losing form, which is the death of the body, and letting go of form, which is deliberately releasing our death-grip on that which is physical, and willfully embracing that which is formless, that which is the enemy of the mind.  Letting go of form is conscious death, that is to say, death which is experienced consciously.  The trick is to let go without physically dying. 

Letting go is something your mind does not want you to do.  It wants to stay in control, it wants to keep you subservient.  It is what it is supposed to do; it is mind and that is its nature.  It will make you think you are dying in an effort to make you grasp and cling.  The trick is that when it makes you think you are dying—let go completely.  Quite a trick.  That is dying before you die. 

Anyone who knows me knows I have been saying it most of my life:  “I want to die.”  Maybe I knew of more than I was aware, because physical death was never what I really wanted.  Letting go is what I came here to do.  It will happen when the physical form goes.  Or, if I wake up sooner, it will happen before that.  And whether it happens or not?  It doesn’t matter.  Consciousness is all that matters, and consciousness is indestructible.  If I wake up now, consciousness will be there; if I wake up on my deathbed, consciousness will be there then. 

And if I never wake up at all, consciousness will still be there. 

I’m getting old. Stop the world I want to get off. Are we there yet? This isn’t fun anymore. Isn’t this show over YET?

I thought I wanted to stay until things really changed, you know, until the end of the Mayan calendar, until Time Wave Zero ends in December 2012, or thereabouts. But that’s just the same old line as always. I want to stay until I (insert way-marker here). Get laid. Am old enough to drink. Get my driver’s license. Meet the love of my life. Lose weight. Do Europe. See the world. Find God. Achieve world peace. It could be anything. And getting there is just as arbitrary as any other moment in life. I don’t think those moments—the ones we conventionally call significant—are necessarily mundane. It could be that all the mundane moments are actually just as magnificent as any one of our best moments.

I could do all those things, and a million more, and where would I be? Here. Sure, ‘here’ might be in a different country, and I might have different things, and be with different people. Maybe I’d even speak another language. But here is where I’d be, nonetheless.

Here is all there is. But, get the rope and suddenly everything becomes an unsustainable loss. Everywhere becomes a ‘here’ which I absolutely must visit before I dangle. And in that moment, ‘here’, the place where the rope is waiting, becomes nowhere, an inverted reality in which ‘here’ is utterly drained of magnificence, and everywhere else—every single other possible existence—becomes unspeakably glorious. Is it this awareness that the suicidal mind lacks?

So, some cheap tears are shed, and some trite trinket is snatched from the bargain bin of insight, and the rope gets put away. But the magnificence that returns to ‘here’ is never as magnificent as it was when it was ‘there’. In that dark limbo, standing on the chair with the rope, all the world, everywhere else but here, every single moment in every spot throughout all the whole fucking universe and beyond, all of it shone like a thousand Suns. And all of it was intricate beyond belief. And beautiful.

There is no ‘here’ in ‘nowhere’. Here is all there is.

Are we there yet?

This is an illusion.

Everything you see and hear are merely toys over the crib, maintained by some not-so-benevolent daddy, assisted by a subservient mommy, and passed off to us as all we need to know. There is an ever widening gap between what people perceive as their influence over their governments and what governments actually do. In fact, people have no influence over their governments, and probably haven’t had for a very long time, and governments have actively (though somewhat covertly) been engaged in acclimating people to the reality that they are completely out of the loop. Once the people accept it, then the governments—or rather the people manipulating the governments—can stop maintaining the facade, which I suspect occupies more of their time and energy than will ultimately be necessary.

This illusion has many layers, none of them real. As an illusion, it disguises itself as an illusion hiding a deeper reality, which is also an illusion. Beyond all of the layers to which we have relatively easy access—many of which we believe are the absolute truth—are threatening dark forms, vanishingly un-graspable, and visible only as a rumored suggestion in our minds. Some of them are real, and some of them are also manufactured illusions.

We are being prepared for the removal of all illusions. This takes some time. To say that beyond the illusions it is not a pretty sight is a childish oversimplification. The revelation of what is hidden will be a dimensional shift, an expansion of those dimensions within which we have always perceived everything. The trauma of that transition will be greater than merely physical. and I suspect that many will not survive. There is nothing which leads me to believe these transitions harbor any compassion whatsoever.

…

The truth is that I have never been isolated, either from others or from ‘the self.’ The truth may be that my earliest experiences were too intense, too rich, too extreme, and too early in life to ever be repeated. As a reuslt, my life since those early intensities pales in comparison, leaving the impression of disconectedness, muffled sound and muted light.

Standing in the quiet fog…

I don’t want a lover. The fact that I do not want a lover makes me angry. And as I review some past would-be lovers—people who threatened me with intimacy in addition to sex—I see that this has always been the case. In the past, I have pursued sex with extremely attractive young men to the exclusion of intimacy. Sex—the pretense of intimacy—took the place of the genuine article. Intimacy? Who needs it? I don’t want a lover.

This state of affairs (no pun intended) does not immunize me against loneliness. Indeed, considering all the risks involved in intimacy, if we could discard loneliness, then we would have no motivation to risk intimacy. Loneliness is a gift. Like hunger. Without hunger, we would starve to death without ever knowing what was wrong. And so it is with loneliness; it drives us to the essential.

We can survive on very little. I learned this when I first abstained from overeating thirty years ago. Then, I achieved a balance between a little hunger and a little food. Hunger, like loneliness, can never be banished. They both are ever-present, as they should be. They are not negative. They are not our enemy. But it is folly to pander to them. Excess is just another means of avoidance. If a child complains to his overwhelmed mother that he is too hot, throwing him overboard into the sea a thousand feet deep is excessive, and constitutes avoidance. On the other hand, finding a shady place on deck for him to rest, and gently mopping his brow with a cool cloth is far less extreme, and far more intimate.

I have discovered that the opposite of intimacy is avoidance. Therefore, like hunger urges me to eat, loneliness urges me to stop avoiding. Now, this idea of pursuing non-avoidance can be as slippery as a peeled grape. For example, confronting strangers in the street would be a type of non-avoidance, but it is, at best, a clumsy way to approach intimacy. Rather like attempting a tooth extraction using a baseball bat.

Long ago, I was told, and recognized intuitively, that a significant part of loneliness is isolation from oneself. If one is fragmented and alienated from oneself, one has no route to the other. This gets very existential-ey and bullshit-ey sounding, but experience bears it out as truth; it is only through the self that we touch another. Likewise, self is the conduit through which others touch us. Therefore, isolation from others, for whatever reason—past trauma, anxiety, fear—is most effectively accomplished by isolation from self. Cut-off the conduit, and I cut off all the perceived threats from others. I am as safe as a bug in a rug. Only I’m lonely.

Now, I can examine you quite closely. I can inhale your scent from the surface of your skin. I can explore the texture of your lips with my own. I can count your eyelashes from an inch away. Focusing on you is easy, but this focal point on the self is making me kind of cross-eyed. I can get close to you, but how do I get close to me?

Robert Ericson, a therapist who conducts a recovery group in Worcester for male survivors of sexual child abuse, says “In order to survive, the child has this sort of vertical splitting in the ego where they compartmentalize and seal off aspects of the self.” This fracturing in the self-structure is probably the most difficult damage to heal, says Ericson, and continues to cripple the survivor decades after the abuse has ended. He lists some problems which typically affect victims, “…a predisposition to all kinds of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, inability to trust, problems in relationships and intimacy, sexual dysfunction…” Victims are not only unable to trust others, he says, but unable to trust themselves – their own judgments and instincts.

That’s from an article I wrote, published fifteen years ago. What I have been doing since then is ignoring what I wrote.

Avoidance is an unrelenting erosion of awareness, like the sea against the shore. Giving in is easy. Fighting that tide is infinitely difficult, but the reward is great. The entire world has been lost to me because my contact to everything, through the self, has been broken. Reuniting with this thing I call ‘the self’ will result in nothing less than saving the entire world.

Nobody reads this crap. I examine it with fascination after placing it here, I note the shape and consistency, the colors and texture, and the density or lightness. Sometimes I recognize a vulgar remnant of reality. Then it swirls in the bowl and I watch it all go away.

Life, death. Sex and loneliness. Joy, sorrow, heat, cold, day, night, sun, rain. Love. This is just a tiny excerpt, made grotesque in magnification, from the beautiful awesomeness of the never ending cycle.

The music was released in the Eighties. I was young; a former lover from the Eighties visited me a year or two ago, after not seeing me for ten years, and kept saying in amazement, “You used to be so hot.”

I guess I’m not hot anymore, but I used to be. I was 30, (in 1988) and still couldn’t grasp that the hot young men who were willing to sleep with me were not doing it out of pity. I was so much more comfortable thinking of them pitying me rather than recognizing that they were actually just hot for my treasure trail—or even worse, acknowledging that they simply liked me. A lot. And when we were done with each other, and I was alone again, I would listen to the mellow Autumn light of Free Fall.

It was the music I went to sleep with before I was positive, and I still hold it close, now fifteen years after that test.

I fell in love with a boy named Christopher the year I worked on the Cape in 1989. He was beautiful, and taught himself piano, and what he played for me in Chatham that year was at least as good as anything David Lanz ever played anywhere. We knew we would never see each other again, and I sent Chris the album, Christofori’s Dream. In a note I sent with the cassette, I wrote, “This is the tape, you are the dream.”

He really was.

Now is about the right time for Lanz’s version of A Whiter Shade of Pale.

What the hell is wrong with Humankind? Don’t we ever get it? These monsters are not imaginary; history proves this again, and again, and again. But we recoil from that truth, and we insist that people who look like you and me cannot be monsters, really. Can they?

The problem I grapple with is how to concentrate reality into a bite size morsel, a consumable for a consumer culture. I struggle to find a particular link, or a concise excerpt, a quote maybe that captures it all, that will leave everyone nodding in recognition and gazing into the middle distance thoughtfully as they walk away, the whole world thus changed.

This is not possible. The monsters are real, the peril is mortal. And the reality which confronts us—the world—is not reducible to a single bitter pill. The terror which we MUST face seems far beyond our capacity to absorb in anything less than several lifetimes. But for the love of humanity, we must not only confront the peril within our lifetimes—within the next several years—but we must conquer it as well.

What is right with Humankind is that they always amaze themselves by overcoming challenges which they ‘knew’ were insurmountable, by accomplishing in their own flesh miracles which they believed none could achieve but the hand of God. Recently, I have discarded most of my former anti-religious rhetoric; I find my attitudes are greatly moderating as I wake from my foggy delusions. Current circumstances have revealed to me a belief I never knew I had, and it is this: I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we will not be given one iota more than we can handle. Call it faith if you wish, though for my part I defer.

I very well may profess a newfound faith, with a still undiscovered voice, well before this nightmare is over.

The most powerful nation this Earth has ever known is being used to rabidly terrorize all of Humankind. The crimes of these over-takers are legion. They have co-opted every one of us as unwitting co-conspirators by cultivating our passivity and by developing among us a tolerance that seems able to ignore any atrocity conceivable. You think those are overstatements? Let me introduce you to the woman who doesn’t know that the black eye she got from walking into a door really came from the man she sleeps with. Denial is the most insidious deceiver of all. And chief among these monsters’ crimes are their cold-blooded and vile machinations to deceive billions of innocents.

If there is one thing that is mind expanding, it is experiencing extremes. For many who endured the administration of George W. Bush, and began to see the facileness of government during his illegitimacy, the advent of Obama was a hope that spanned from the kernel of our souls to the outer space of our dreams. To witness the depth and breadth of those dreams—nearly infinite, but not quite—to see that devoured with apparent ease into the gaping, salivating maw of deceit, reveals not only the breathtaking scale of evil, but hints at the heretofore hidden magnificence of good that by definition exceeds evil. For many who have seen the Alex Jones’ film, Obama Deception, it expanded our minds in just such a monumental—and terrifying—way.

These petty words mean little in the crisis of our ignorance. A small fraction of a percentage recognizes the evil that is upon us, and they are throwing stones at the tanks in Gaza, and dying for it. Others are losing farms, homes, and lives to CIA funded thugs in Afghanistan, or just losing lives in black-op fomented violence in the cities of Iraq. Still others who cannot hope to understand why, are the children in the smog of LA, cut off from medical care and dying of asthma. It is not only the relative few forlorn individuals on this planet who know of these dangers first-hand, but also nations, besieged, yet proudly defiant, like Honduras and Venezuela. They tell the truth, and truth cannot be rejected from any quarter, especially in a world where death-dealing lies come from almost every quarter.

I think Marie Antoinette was not so much flippant in her famous retort, “Let them eat cake,” as she was being scornful out of frustration with peasants who, at the time when she spoke those words, had not stood up for themselves, and had largely tolerated intolerable lives for a generation. She didn’t want them to kill her, one assumes, but some kind of revolt was certainly in order, she must have thought.

Your economy has been gutted, your children’s future is in the hands of a very few immeasurably wealthy monsters who are allowing a tiny fraction of their wealth to be used—at their pleasure—as the entire economy of this nation, until they are ready to pull the plug. They are not worried about a revolt. Indeed, they want a revolt; they have planned for it. And they will make it happen when the time is right for them. And your children’s debt will never be paid. You are dooming them to a life as wage slaves, where the only way they can get ahead is to be more evil than the next guy. But even magnificence in evil won’t get them very far because the competition will be fierce. The masses will all be evil, soullessly evil, just to survive. And if you hope for success for your progeny in that kind of world, I cannot imagine what you will hope for that success to be. “For if a man gains the whole world, and loses his soul…”

I say, let them eat cake. In fact you might as well start eating it right now. Either that, or you better start doing something very different, very soon.

Remember the post World War II movies which demonized the Nazi bad guys, and glorified (rightly so) the heroic actions of the few who stood up to the Nazi’s, running underground resistance groups and providing escape routes to those who were ‘wanted’ for ‘relocation’? I remember them. I watched from the comfort of my unchallenged 1960′s adolescence, and imagined myself—against all odds—doing the right thing in the midst of grave threats and terror from evil authoritarians all around me. It was clear to me then what would have been the right thing to do during the late 1930′s in Nazi Germany, and I hoped that I would have had the courage to do the right thing had I actually been there. I actually lamented the dullness of my life when I was eight, and how, from that vantage point, I could see no such heroic challenge visible anywhere in my future.

What a failure of imagination!

We are there, now. Except that the current economic meltdown is not being caused by a draconian Versailles Treaty, which is what bankrupted Germany and impoverished her people after WWI and set the stage for the birth and subsequent domination of Hitler’s Third Reich. The significant difference is that ours is an ad hoc economic meltdown, conceived, implemented, and executed solely for the purpose of forcing otherwise unwilling free men and women to subvert their common sense and goodwill to the demonic state in exchange for a pittance of relief from the state’s threats of overwhelming harassment, illegal imprisonment, certain impoverishment, and inevitable death only after unfathomable suffering. Free speech will soon be illegal, and is largely so now. Due process is already severely marginalized in the zeal for imposing extra-judicial consequences for activities which heretofore have never been illegal, like owning a gun, having a baby, or refusing a vaccination.

When they come and do what we know is wrong, we will look the other way again and again until there is nowhere else to look. And then, when we have no choice but to face the truth, it will be too late.

Seek out the wrongdoing now! Confront it before it confronts you. And never look the other way. Never. Do something oppositional—no matter how small—every time you see an injustice, especially when those injustices are perpetrated under color of authority. And after one encounter, the second confrontation is just as difficult, but much more effective. Every moment of standing against what is wrong empowers you, advances freedom, and uplifts the human condition to the benefit of us all, not to mention the power of your example inspiring others to do the same. Eventually, standing up for what is right becomes a thousand times more effective than the first time, and the sooner we get that first confrontation done, the earlier we achieve total effectiveness in resisting the abuse, oppression and tyranny that these injustices are designed to impose.

Morality is the final law, and in times like these our consciences can be our only guide. And these truths are self evident, that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are the new Greatest Generation, like our fathers and grandfathers in World War II, and the times we live in today presents us with the same great privilege they had—to save the World. Again.

Senator Kerry,

Please oppose the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

You are from Massachusetts. If this bill passes, it will mark the demise of the very freedoms which Massachusetts was a leader in achieving 240 years ago.

I’m sure your mind is already made up. But as a constituent I am ethically obligated by the seriousness of the threat this bill represents to register with you my opposition to it.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act known as HR 2454 was narrowly passed by the House of Representatives on June 26, 2009 by a vote of 219 to 212. It is going to the Senate, but it is not clear when. The available info about a schedule for this to come up for a vote in the Senate has been impossible to find. Announcements have been made that this will never pass the Senate, which seems to me to be a smokescreen to allow it to be passed with little attention from the public.

E-mail your senator.