Friday, August 1, 2014

In Which... Aw Hell, I'll Figure it Out

I read something rather quotable in a Cracked.com article the other day, about how people tend to seek external validation rather than personal growth.

It struck me because I'm pretty sure I'm backsliding; at the very least, I am not evolving in the direction I wish to be. 

Until very recently--okay, I'll be honest--I really wanted life as I know it to dramatically shift at the end of 2012.  I knew it was too much to hope for, but all the logistics in the world did not keep me from hoping and hoping.  When nothing happened at all, at least in the visible world, there was nothing left for me to hope for (perhaps I simply have unreasonable expectations).

See, I don't really want to live in this world.  And I am so dissatisfied that absolutely nothing seems to matter.  The feeling of fatedness has vanished.  There is no longer meaning awaiting me, no messages from higher selves, nothing but the bleak monotony of an illusionary world that will slip and fade into the nothing from which it came.

Science affords much of the greatest awe I have experienced in recent years, but I don't really believe our universe is real.  Holographic, perhaps, even hallucinatory.  But real?  I don't sense it. 

Perhaps I should simply face my worst fear by submerging myself into it:  becoming a hopeless, dreamless, self-medicating, self-absorbed muggle for whom all the lights have gone out. 

At least then there will be no direction left to go but out.  At least then the delusions of my own grandeur will wash away, leaving the grasping desire to-be-recognized-for-how-very-special-I-am exposed to be scoured away by the elements. 

Perhaps then I would be able to surrender the delusional mind that insists it has good ideas about what I am and what I should be doing/thinking/feeling.  I know it's mistaken.  I know it has no more clue about my identity than a goldfish has about its own.  Yet I value it undeservedly, identify with it, believe it to be Me.

If we are not our minds, what are we? I ask, because I'm sure there is an answer.  I'm also sure the answer will never come in words or thoughts, but those are the only places I find myself looking.

In Flatland, a 2D polygon encounters a 3D sphere and is brought up into 3D.  Upon his return, he is seen as a madman and tries to remember what direction he had gone in.  Not North, East, West, or South, but Up.

Maybe I just need to find my Up.