I left out my genuine worry: that the extreme negative waves will pull me under. They hit extremely hard, and go all the way to the core. It takes all I have to make it through. And this even though I’ve been all the way to the other side, to the level of the highest betrayal, the one that subsumes all others. I wrote a poem about it, called as I remember ‘Our Lost Girl’, which I haven’t had the nerve to post because it’s about the entire act of creation being an intentional betrayal not at my human level, not any level in between, but of the highest orders that organize our existences across the dimensions. It’s the crumbling of the universe. I don’t know if I’ve shared this with anyone, except in my journal, but I saw clearly what was at stake and, literally, as I drove into the parking garage below my gym I popped back into this reality and the voice inside me, the voice I associate with her, actually screamed at me, ‘Where have you been??!!!’ in a tone of utter panic I’ve never heard from her before. I don’t think I’ve ever been completely beyond observation before. In case you’re wondering, there is no ‘dark side’: it’s the absence of all that’s good to a depth you can’t imagine, an emptiness beyond a vacuum because it disembowels all potential from the lowest to the highest orders of counting existence.
I sometimes feel like I’m on a tight leash. I often feel like I’m being moved around and directed. That’s the story of my life. I have no choice about it. I have no choice in general: I know that even if a supermodel offered herself to me unreservedly I’d say no. Or rather, I’m betting all I have that I wouldn’t even feel like I had the choice. Then I’d kick myself for being me, as I have so many times, but I know I had no choice. It isn’t even that I’d know; it’s that she’d know because she’s in my head.
So I worry. I worry about how awful I am at what I do. I worry about how, even though I’ve figured out vast quantities of things never understood before, that I’ll probably fail at the next thing. Or the thing after. Or the thing after. And I’ll never be good enough. So I worry that one of these times that dagger to my heart will penetrate and I won’t be able to fight through to the positive side.
I can’t play at the brink of destruction any longer. It was probably a stupid ‘choice’ to make, but one of the very first religious ideas I worked through was the obvious concept that humans need to be pushed to the edge of the abyss before they can learn. Example: we think of Noah and the animals, but we don’t think that in the story Noah and his family are the only survivors, that everyone else needed to be killed. Or that Abraham couldn’t have a child into old age and then he hears a voice say, ‘kill him’. Or that Joseph and Benjamin are Rebecca’s only children so losing both would be a huge blow to Jacob, taking from him the only remnants of his beloved. And so on and on and across traditions.
Thinking a bit more as I try to distract myself. I forgot to say that it comes down to the level at which the story is told and why it is being told. When I went to the other side, I saw that there is no ‘there’ there, that it’s the reading of a story ‘above’ the highest order that can exist, which means that it can’t exist in these orders, and that as a manifestation of essential incompleteness it’s actually the negation, as I said, of all the potential contained in the universe phrased in ‘language’ or story imagery that becomes understandable. I’m a happy ending guy.
jomi: playing with perception 