tremendous terror

Where am I in this maze of terror?
Existing in emergence and formation
Of unresolved impulses
Compressed along the innards of time

Painstakingly kept from attention
the intention of evolutionary impulses, maybe

Growing up into the fullness of life
Waking up to the hidden force within
The tremendous power
The tremendous terror

Why do you trust
The power of your thought?

Abnegated by the terror of the void
Thought loses all power

From whence does the kind emotion emerge?
The One that caresses your deepest being
Assuring you,
The world is Kind

The hidden terror arouses it
Forces it's power
And captures your attention

Peace Emerges

From the Other

From an inner acknowledgement
That All is Ok







And then you think

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

"The hidden terror arouses it
Forces it's power
And captures your attention
Peace Emerges
From the Other
From an inner acknowledgement
That All is Ok"
The poem is outstanding. You led the reader to question and fear to some kind of hope. The above lines I liked a lot. These words could stand alone and have great purpose. Thank you for sharing the excellent poetry.
Coyote

[Mike Defreitas]

Thanks for the kind reviews.

[Mary Bosworth]

This is an amazingly insightful piece

[Latifa]

I like this piece a lot, it has a great depth to it, would you mind explaining for me this part more
Why do you trust
The power of your thought?

Abnegated by the terror of the void
Thought loses all power

[Mike Defreitas]

I had an experience the other day that led to a terrifying psychological insight that who I am - the person I see and experience myself to be - is "emergent", not really existing in any substantial way, but simply a representation of my own symbolizing mind of what the body urges me to experience.

It was simply terrifying. I had to write about it, to give some "form" to the utter chaos and fear that such a perception can impose on you. First, the thing that really seemed to scare me was the depersonalization of the experience. You see yourself, as it were, from the perspective of some part that has no "stake" in the world of activity. You realize that the person you feel yourself to be is essentially an "emergent" phenomenon that grows from the emotions that tug out consciousness into "outer" activity. So essentially, I experienced an intense split off - a depersonalization - looking out onto the world from the perspective of the void - the nothingness that eats you up and leaves you uninvolved and unmoved. And to see from there is to essentially "be" that - and the self awareness of that perception is utterly, utterly, unsettling.

Many religions speak of this state of awareness, and indeed, if you do not have a strong enough cognitive outlook that can give linguistic description to what you've just experienced, the experience itself can drive you to insanity: a traumatic "break" and a descent into a structural schizophrenia.

It's a terrifying insight, but I am so thankful that I am educated and knowledgeable enough to know what to do with these experiences. As the saying goes, you have to "name it to tame it". My knowledge of the psyche from different areas of psychology/psychoanalysis/evolutionary psychology allows me to frame it and settle it in my mind. I tell myself "Mike, relax. Yes. This is the truth what you just saw: the self is an illusion; it emerges in the context of relating with other selves: or, for that matter, the "other" - the permanent psychological object of our inner psyche. That "other" is me: The "I" is the other. I saw from the "Godhead" you could say. For that brief moment, I saw myself as utterly not-existing. Emerging only when called out by sub-conscious representational processes that represent myself to myself in the theatrical performance we call "life". But, Mike, this is how it is. Take responsibility for this fact and do not run away from it. Do not have fear" I tell myself this again and again because deep down, what keeps me from thinking about that horrible perception? What keeps me away from it? The Other: the one we posit to exist. Is it me? That nothingness I saw and experienced? But still. There are things which "emerge" in the process of life and self creation which gives us a sense that a true Good exists.

In order to engage in life and "think" - i.e symbolize your bodily or self experience to yourself - we need to feel the power to do so. When you don't know "the secret" of how the self and ego is essentially immaterial, this doesn't become an issue. Ignorance for such a person might mean a superficial bliss. But, when you experience this, and come to understand it (to think about it) the only thing that would keep the instinctive terror that arises when the perception occurs is a belief that a "compassionate one" exists. However you want to understand this. God, for people of Judeo-Christian or Muslim views, or Buddha, for Easterners. There is some posited ontological Other who "anchors" the flux that gives us a sense of the universes goodness.

Thats what I was trying to get at with this piece. Both the human capacity to really think about these matters and experience a primal fear, but at the same time, heroically work through it until you find some sort of resolution. Poetry does this for me.

[Latifa]

well,I completely understand what you're saying and the feeling that you had with this experience, for me sometimes I have a baffling recognition of existence, for instance sometimes I'm like completely relaxing or watching tv or doing whatever and in instance of second my inner changes to realise it's own existence and the outer space, let me tell you, it drives me crazy, that self dialogue, the acknowledgement of being in that moment, every thing start to slow down and I ask myself " so I really exist, this life, this moment, I feel ,I react ........etc and than I say what if everything was just black and nonexistent.
it's really a difficult a experience and I often choose to ignore it because if I stay in it for more than few minutes I will definitely as you said loose my sanity or suffer from schizophrenia .

[Mike Defreitas]

Thanks for sharing that with me Latifa.

Yup, this experience is universal and humans worldwide give different "explanation" to it. Ultimately, I think a religious or spiritual understanding is necessary to keep that perspective in check: to keep your ability to think and be with other people in a spontaneous and human way alive. Were two at our core: a mind and a body. And yet, we are most alive when we feel our bodies, connect with our emotions, and act spontaneously. At the same time (paradoxically enough) everyone should (in my opinion) recognize how the self is a creation - a fiction - which ultimately finds it existence in the non-linear dynamics of human-to-human interactions (which begins with the mother/infant dyad).

I got to tell you. When I wrote this I was seriously anxious. In retrospect, its funny, but at the time I truly was panicked at how I was feeling. To be honest, completely, I was with a few friends and smoked a Joint. Weed interrupts continuity of thought by disrupting short term memory proccesses. We build or represent reality by linking together the past with the present. But if that isn't happening - or it's being interrupted by an exogenous agent - you can get a deeper and more narrowed - dissociated - perception of the "moment". I was talking about how or where our capacity to symbolize comes from. It was just fascinating - and bemusing - for me to think about this. As I probed deeper I saw in my minds eye this virtual web of interactions: and in this web "I" found myself. In other words, all of us our embedded in this virtual web - not just me. But our cognitive/mental and affective/emotional processes are so interlinked that we don't see the process in action.

Anyways. Everything crumbled away in that moment. I saw the blank screen that the self and social reality is projected upon: the void. AND IT TERRIFIED ME. My friends thought I was kidding when I got up and started pacing - which I needed to do to quell the anxiety - but as I spoke to them about what I was feeling they were more compassionate and thoughtful and allowed me to "talk" to make sense of what I had just experienced. Then, I came on here and wrote a few poems.

It's so important to encourage and help one another in our individual journeys through this thing we call life. Thanks for taking an interest!

I'll check out some more of your poems later :)

[Latifa]

you're welcome

[John Anderson]

This is just beautiful. Your imagery was so vivid and your descriptions so life-like you made me feel like I was there. Excellent writing