Journal Entry from March 17 2012

What is this shit that makes us twist and miss the chances of change to derange our fantastical little brains into unholy alliances with goblin-like demons? Why do I look out at this sorry place of disgrace and see nothing but sad-faced hate and unrelenting fate? Why does the fearsome force of Poseidon suddenly descend upon us and mirror the internal flagrant ruckus that bucks us in the mutt? May I one day fray and come buckling down the eons with glasses for the ray? Shall I undergo this horrific life-process and emerge ancient and unrepentant? Will I redeem the horrors of this soul-crushing day by releasing the sorrows of this wicked play to play in the dandelion-studded cerulean glades? Heaven, will you take my plea and please clean this residue of selfish genes? Hell, underneath, have I requested an audience with your thief to sign by blood usurped from its garlands and spend eternities writhing unknowingly? Have we any more nail-biting facades to charm our child with? Have you any more inner sources from whence to draw water out of wine for us? Are we here to endlessly spin this wheel or shatter it? Can you feel this fiery freeze inside my darkest chest unpinning the solitary from its quest? Can you not see how miserably I am squirming within my own naked breast? Will I whither under this willow and receive her curative spirit or wallow for another two decades of pain?

I am brought to the basest base in my heart, fraught with the darkening veils of peril, undergoing hideous demonstrations and alchemy, window-panes variously shuttering and unfettering me, a bulletproof gazing space taunting yet never leaving me, the chisel imploring yet crumbling to ashes at mere touch, my head hammering the harder for its scattering, my staff shivering like rattle-tails, my tale growing darker with every intensifying ray. This scarce resource I pull out of the ether threatens depletion. The force of my heart’s yearning wavers and teeters. The hidden hands tremble and disassemble. The dark time undulates back across the horizon. The mellow days are here to disavow us. The yellow tides are dear yet have abandoned us. This horror I fear is just for my consumption, and I shall be spit out of God’s gut dismantled.

Earth, digest me! Sun, divest me! God, direct me! 

Journal Entry from March 8 2012

The devout men of our times are looking askance at the fancied heroism that belies our betrayed berated fools that escalated from Golgotha to organisms that underwent gregarious transformations. This thing that we discern when we are firm in our earthen urn is like a chrysalis that shall unearth us from the moldering rot of this scalding wounding womb that is tomb. Here hear of the fearful mere maggots that scampered about without face for an era of disgrace after meager portions of this vivid race to obtain visceral grace from underneath an altar of our heaviest lace. This bind we find when we climb high is too nigh to the underlying sigh that may arise of a sudden and overtake miles of countryside wide for a deep disgorging of our elemental tendrils that slither like snakeskins caught in a wind too mild for singing. For what? For naught! And uncover from hidden bosoms our fiery summits. Some stray too wildly from the traversed path of the ancients and others whither too coldly upon vibrant moonscapes from where our magical forebears took flight. Those effective creatures that spanned centuries of holy putrefaction for the unholy purification of these rotten corpses are with us still in the form of wind, star, and mountain. This furious flesh sack cannot continue to track its passage under the sordid stares of the sun. Our solitary journey to the nether world brings great joy due to the condensation of many fickle spoons into their counterparts in jest. This sorry tale that was told for many days of this age did not succeed in bringing us to more frequently elated states. However, neither did your yearning suffice to make men rejoice upon the unearthing of our precious hearts of diamond rock. Those wicked curves of seduction that shackled our matrimonial eyes into furor of bondage are continuously gnawing at our marrow. One day we will be split open and gush our innards to the smiling skies. These emanations of our visceral branches will make many creatures subside their rides and will arrive as a vicious tide that will then recede in due time. At repeated intervals it will reengage our hideous sides and turn us back towards the glorious rise. This course has been drawn for us since the beginning of time. But a day will come when the rollercoaster will glide beyond its rails. The wheel that steers will no longer be here and my sucking tentacles will retract into a primordial blob. An undifferentiated entity of infinite potential, as the unlimited proliferative capacity is revealed to the heavens. The blind urge will be unwilled. The wise love will be our guide. The higher realms will house our loftier forms. The greatest sages will point at the moon. The foolish miserable masses will follow slowly. Eventually our world will be annihilated. Finally, the story will be concluded. This will not happen in a time that is later from the current time. Rather, it is a state that occurs outside of time. Involved in the transcendence that gestates this divine sign, we will be evolved and a nothing will replace the nothings of our time. 

Journal Entry from February 21 2012

Extricate thyself from the fascination with horrendous orifices or suffer the smothering of eternity upon thy scrawny bosom. We endure and then end in manure. We flutter for five fantastical moments of lugubrious quietude under a forlorn fern and are shorn of all concern for the well-established pathos of our time. Hence, it has been said and shall again be spread unto thine ears like a mighty dread that descends upon fear, obliterating all gears and mechanized entities, terminating all years of agonizing enmity, that a shallow pit of shit is fit for the unregenerate git and his loony tits. When once he will have come to bare himself to the mist, rest his head upon a grassy frieze, tickle a hummingbird’s breast with his pinky, spin abreast of a mighty gale chuckling, gentle will be the touch of Sun’s rays upon his merry enthuse. But is this a tale told for to console the ill and terminating carcass-to-be? Is this a comfortable cushion to push into our expiring bush-kin? Or is it rather a yellow brick road climbing gracefully into the eerie pink moon? Shall I ascend via an inner sense of the fleeting march of our brief pulsating hives? Gorgeous is a word too narrow to contain the picturesque qualities of the slain shadows that flitter every which way. These fields of grey that cleave to each other obey not the holy Mother which bids us all come out and play for the betterment of her day, and we repay the immense burdens of our debts by exclaiming a sardonic “NAY” from our heavy lips that betray our true hidden idolatries and SUDDENLY WE SAY: “release me unto the nether of this gregarious day, and allow me to saunter naked as I was on that fateful day, and unsheathe me from the scabbard that keeps me pinioned all the while it impedes my way, and tear me in half or in quarter, to splash and thunder astray into the distance. We are not yours to command and thy orders I shall NOT obey. And I will rush to the occasion and unleash my tongue to its heart’s content, to the spur of its hidden intelligence, to commune with the heart of life’s sacred undercurrents. I do not care if I am unseemly by thy standards, those wicked chains that keep us tethered and branded. I do not don any emblems or signage. I am lost and am ecstatic to know it. Flattered by the thought that my thoughts are all meaningless, I float peacefully to the highest realm of insignificance. I disintegrate all compound objects into the original constituents. A single beam of light travelling endlessly in an eternal timelessness is all I am, and all there is. And what is this heavy material, anyway? Condensed energy, might they say? Occult forces of nature, hidden essences of blind urgings, will-to-life brought to object by passing through the world-bearing lens of our knowledge, in varying degrees of its clarity, so they say. Heaven and hell, for whose sake others may pray. But what is all of this when seen from the perspective of that singular photon? Witness to cosmic time spans that span no time at all, vast reaches of the far-flung corners of the universe all in one glancing sweep, an undying flame that keeps the wheels churning and the gears turning. An edifice to behold this reality truly is. And while reveling in the gargantuan scales of infinity, we come to shed ourselves of ourselves. This is the meaning of the holy death. In order that life may spring forth from frostbitten sloth, we are bidden in the very moments we are most distraught. A secret voice comes singing in the night, hidden in plain sight. Ride out in a twilight flight to make contact with this underlying might, and discover a source of undying delight. Ride out with me and drop a bucket into the deep mysteries, and patiently await your turn!"

Journal Entry from February 12 2012

What in the world caries as much weight as the essentialist doctrine of free fates divined and resting fully blooming for the time of sorrows divested of all ethereal mores. Spinning in free fall blasted out of the sandcastles of years gone in the winds of ash cloud. Gone upon our merry gales that spin us exaltingly towards merrier dawns. Heavy these burdens are for the sapling that discerns not its ultimate game to be placed mysteriously at the footsteps of these stains upon the glorious sheaths of Excalibur. They that raise the crunching of the spoons for more tomorrow for more and more, the morrow. Histories of personal drama unfold heroically as though we witnessed the grandest majesties of the eras come faintly gleaning the hidden force underneath our garments of stretching sinews. This crime that is what is in all its fecundity of seeing sees not the seer’s vast sea undulating across the millennia. We are swallowed in an interpenetrating fever that cannot be spawned by the mind that responds. These days of ours countable on fingers of leviathans, these numerable stumbling blocks paving our paths, these infinite moments of joy upon the shores of peace, drenched in the gladness of ‘hi!’, swelling eternally encompassing and radiating, finally to collapse again and return to the dot. As little or as big, the optics of trickery retains expansivity of the dimensions. We may inflate the littlest into a veritable goliath and cosmos can be abstracted away to flappings of the leaves of Membranes. In a moment cannot you entertain a trillion gods and goddesses? To feast upon and stake braziers for an era of Dionysus? The opulent scarves they wore bore not the emblem of our shattered temples. Our walls shorn asunder and trampled with the beating drums of the boots we died and were buried under. Beguiled have I been for many years upon fears. I hears many of tales that told me stories I would not have rathered to have heard. But growth in the chrysalis comes from liquefaction at first glance and reconstitution through thirst quenched. Burnt stench of many corpses spilled from the blunted barriers of cities I have raised and trumpeted through on my way to oblivion. Garnering magical ecstasies that effuse out of the bosom of my holiest apical strife to undo even the hardiest sallow protuberance that berates my heart. And I am suddenly sent upwards across many distant lands and seas, shot as from a Spanish naval cannon into the savage bush of nativity and measured by the mundane mantle upon which I settled. But unbeknownst to my benefactors, I have risen farther and farther than Newton could have predicted. I have sustained blow after blow and I am wrecked and broken. I have become a lifeless husk of transparency that floats enraptured. Clouds and azure shadows have I for company, keeping pace at all times with the golden orbic chariots in my mind. Travelling through the titanic spaces and times of many epochs, yet still young and fledgling am I. When once I will have reached the end of time, I may reckon on falling over into a deadly abyss and die, I’ll find the perennial spring of being nonplussed at mine and still flowing, gently carrying many more awe-struck children into eternity. 

Social Anxiety

Social anxiety can be an extremely debilitating condition for those who suffer from it. It comes in various degrees ranging from mere shyness to full-blown avoidance personality disorder. I want to speculate here about what may underlie this and hopefully reach some sort of clarity regarding its conceptual classification.

First, this problem seems intimately related to feelings of shame. A lot of clinical cases identify that patients suffering from this condition have an extreme fear of blushing in public. Their concern is that this will severely embarrass them and that others will laugh at them. Other manifestations of this syndrome are the avoidance of eye contact and standing apart from others. These are strategies that these patients use to minimize their anxiety. Another fear they usually have is that they will blank out in mid-sentence and so seem stupid or socially awkward, and that this will lead to their social ostracism and humiliation. All of these phenomena point to the root of this disorder in being ashamed of oneself or of one’s social inadequacy. However, the disorder is an anxiety disorder, meaning that its positive symptom is fear or worry, and specifically fear of being ashamed in public. This may be due to earlier imprints in the memory of childhood situations where this has happened and led to a very strong emotional response. This early life experience conditioned the patient to fear the recurrence of these episodes and so to avoid social situations altogether. In other words, the classically conditioned fear leads to operant conditioning resulting from systematic avoidance, which reduces social anxiety, thereby perpetuating and strengthening the learned fear and behavior.

One question that may be asked at this point is: why should public humiliation be an inherently upsetting experience? That is to ask, what is the mechanism that leads us to be so emotionally invested in the reactions we produce in others? Cognitive behavioral therapy for social phobia revolves around trying to challenge a patient’s belief that other people are judging him/her or thinking otherwise negative thoughts. These patients will interpret others’ sometimes benign gestures and glances as evidence of harsh judgments about them. This all points to the source of the disorder as being due to wanting others to think well of us. While this is true of most of us, in these patients it rises to an extreme pitch and becomes an ever-present gnat whirring about their consciousness, issuing its continuous queries and fantasies about what others may have thought about them. It seems that for these people, self-worth is completely yoked to the judgments of others, be they of praise or of blame. Thus, another aspect of therapy is to challenge this notion and to try to get these patients to generate internal sources of self-worth.

The reason that I even bring any of this up is that I feel much affinity with these patients, and though I have never been diagnosed with a disorder of this kind, I feel that I may have at times been close to it. While never reaching the threshold of an anxiety disorder, I have always had mild fears relating to my social inadequacies. What’s more, I feel the same way about pretty much most of the psychiatric disorders that I am currently learning about. Whether it’s bipolar disorder, phobias, paranoid schizophrenia, or major depression, I feel that the roots of all of these lie dormant within my mind, ready to be activated given the requisite triggers.

Returning to the discussion of social anxiety disorder, I wanted to see if this could somehow be framed in terms of pride or some other such ego construct, where ego is not to be taken in the Freudian psychodynamic sense but in a more general self-affirming egotistical sense, as it is understood in common parlance. If we postulate that some degree of pride, whether merited or not, is fundamental to the human psyche, then it seems quite natural for the sort of social anxiety phenomena described above to arise. Pride involves the creation of a favorable mental image of oneself, and the sustenance and promulgation thereof. Therefore when situations arise that may lead others to develop an unfavorable image that differs markedly from the favored one, this leads to considerable stress. This is satisfactory for me as an explanation of the phenomenon at the adult level once the ego has been distilled and installed. And perhaps the crucial conditioning event from one’s past did not occur in childhood, but in early adolescence during that turbulent time when the innocence of childhood is passing and the pride of adulthood is fast emerging.

Now, given what has been said above, this disorder appears to be the manifestation of what I’m going to call the ‘will-to-be-liked’. This relates our subject matter to the distinction between will and representation that Schopenhauer teaches us about. Will, in his philosophy, is the kernel of existence and is not much more than blind urge or striving. Representation is the knowledge that is generated by brains in service of the will. Another framing of this particular manifestation of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ may be to call it the ‘will-to-dominate’. Framing it this way brings hierarchical social structures to bear on the issue. Specifically, the current vertical organization of our social strata induces people to aim to reach the top of the ladder, in order that they may have power over their peers and surroundings. This is fundamental to the delusional human psyche that views its individuality as absolute. This is the ignorance that spawns the infinite phenomena of the representational world, each vying to secure a little piece or portion of the whole and call it ‘mine’, not recognizing that each and every little part is no more than its own image reflected through the kaleidoscopic lens of ego.

So, if this is the case, we may now ask the question: what is required? Since generalized anxiety is such a common experience, although not necessarily always reaching diagnostic proportions, seeking an answer for this question would seem to be a pressing concern. A commonality amongst all the anxiety disorders that underlies all of them is fear and worry. Any fear that is not due to immediate bodily threats is specifically what is referred to here. That is to say, fears that are anticipatory and not related to any specific sense datum. This can only come about if two conditions are met: 1) the individual is fixated on thoughts related to the future, and 2) the individual is fixated on the self/ego. If the first condition is not met – i.e. if the fear is aroused by a real danger currently present to the individual – then it becomes a matter of biological necessity that aversive reactions are evoked, the so-called ‘fight or flight response’ that is instigated by the sympathetic autonomic nervous system. If the second condition is not met – i.e. if the individual is currently in a trance-like or expansive state of mind that is not restricted to self-thoughts – then anticipatory fear cannot happen because there is no framework of self-preservation, as the mind is not centered in any one spatiotemporal locale. Thus, when the mind opens up to the whole with which it is identical and loses its restrictive ego-centeredness, it is freed from all worry and negative states of mind. In fact, another anecdotal report of why patients with panic disorder have panic attacks describes their feelings of helplessness and lack of control over bodily and environmental processes. But the notion of control is precisely the delusion that stems from an imagined independence from the whole and an arbitrary autonomy that is quite simply fantastical. Fear of death is another potent trigger of these panic attacks; but do these patients fail to recognize that death is certain, and that fear of something certain is ludicrous? In short, all of the self-preservation thoughts and behaviors are related to individualistic consciousness that believes in an absolute barrier between itself and the whole and therefore wishes to secure its livelihood, even if at the expense of the whole and if this entails taking advantage of others. So to answer the question we began this paragraph with: what is required is to correct this optical illusion of consciousness that discretizes the continuous whole, splits an inseparable singularity, which rips itself violently apart in tortuous acts of self-cannibalization, and spins an ever-thickening veil of self-deception with which it blinds itself from reality. May we unveil nature’s face and learn to recognize one in all and all in one.