The Meaning of Pain

Such a compelling perspective. A different setting in a different world and a different set of affects. Pushing me along a different path with a different feel for the world I'm experiencing. As this different person, different possibilities open up for me, new ways of thinking, interacting, believing, imaging and being.

What does the difference between the two amount to? Emotion. Feeling. Arousal. Affect. F*****g body undermines me; which is really a metaphor for saying that the vagal nerve complex in connection with memory and emotional areas has thrown my brain into a state of profound dysregulation. Which is a nice objectifying metaphor for a profoundly believable emotional narrative about my life. History and meaning are what crystallize the structure of my mind. Disengaging, ultimately, is about finding meaning in something deeper than the facts of my personal history.

But how to do that? I'm already doing it. I'm already on this mystical path of self-transformation Began as one thing, but with each new thought a new process was forced into action. The system shifted - I shifted - into a new zone of possibility; new ways of thinking; new books for reading; a changed ethic, a more complicated psychology, a deeper metaphysics. And as you thought of these things, it was also because you were feeling these things.

You couldn't feel any of those emotions if it were for those experiences you had, night after night, falling to sleep with the same hope, with same inward turn into sleep, where the hope for getting better could be transferred to the bliss of unconsciousness, to the fact of no longer having to deal with this.

But then life, your own actions in connection with your inherent vulnerabilities, caused you do something that had negative results. Body meditation; stimulating interoceptive awareness in a body lost to it's trauma, ignorant of it's disastrous qualities. Immersing in it, and then feeling this weird arousal; which can only be funneled with each new terrifying thought, each new paranoia, into something more horrifying: my inability to disbelieve, to stop thinking about it, to stop talking about it; to stop searching for it online. I'm becoming it; I'm entertaining the possibility.......of its happening....now....the next moment. The building up of anxiety with paranoia, each moment adding a dimension of exhaustion, terror and hopelessness.

A confused mind with no center of gravity, just moving like flotsam in an aimless ocean. Pointing to nowhere, stuck, and convinced of it's stagnancy. Who could believe? How could he believe? How? The question needed to be asked; my mind was in the right way. It led it to think and ask questions, to never be satisfied; to be skeptical and open.

The only thing that you held to, which gave you true peace of mind - sleep - the most cherished and precious thing that you had, which you relied upon: that was what you called into question. Could I sleep? Could it happen? NEED it happen? The question terrified you. The question yolked the fear to the thought, evoking a process of thought -> feeling -> thought -> feeling, creating a stable brain pattern, a stable relationship between the minds observations and the observer himself.

And so you didn't sleep, and with this profound arousal; this profoundly mighty anxiety within me: I am shaking and tremoring and the fear is in my gut, settling there, holding the whole of me ransom to the presence of fear: of utter annihilation! It calls me, this terror of darkness, this fact of the void, and it hopes to swallow everything of meaning and goodness in life, and with it, and in it's absence, I am negated.

Not one day of this. Not two. But 21 straight days of this. With each day, my mind becomes more subtled, existing with less room, with less stability; my affects have gone completely haywire on me. My mind jumps at any feeling; my nerves inflame and my thoughts scatter in every direction; towards fears, towards the thought of hearing a voice: the menace of insanity, the inferred possibility that seeps into the knowing mind.

How to sleep in this? No sleeping. A ceaseless pain; a hallow nothingness. Mind floating empty in space, with nothing to anchor it down to.

Eyes are bloodshot and as I sit with every moment, my mind is emblazoned with a growing awareness: awareness of self: of its own pain: of its vulnerability. Emotions swirl and the mind agitates in between emotions, reflecting on each of them and struggling to pull back; to not think. But it fails, again, and again, hundreds of times, thousands of times. With each push back the mind immures its being further into the chaos.

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Even now, as I reflect, I hold the memory of a most horrifying pain. But with it is something else: a self born from the fire of suffering. The fear of. The fear of. In paying attention to my suffering, I augmented self awareness, a most valuable tool in analyzing and perceiving.

I feel the existence of other forces and perspectives, built from the experience of study and living with each new piece of learned knowledge; a development of mind that accrues from a steady stream of new data; new information to assess, new ways of looking and seeing it. Diminishing the fears. The very fears that have stricken you and built a powerful fortress within your psyche. Enlarging your amygdala and tainting all incoming sensory information with the vibration of fear.

But the fear is not all there is. There's the mind and its narrative complexities. Certain ideas about self, related as always to how the self IS with others; its this sort of information which traumatizes by tantalizing the mind with its overwhelming meaningfulness. Felt meaningfulness: feeling and concept, devising meaning in its awesome reality. Dragging the mind like a slave to its center of gravity.

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These two powerful views, separated by a chasm of experience. So utterly opposite, producing two, utterly different persons. And the world, out there, consisting of people relationally traumatized, and worse still, the real killer, ignorant and defensive of their ignorance of their own aberrant development.

How would you even address that? You can't. You accept it, you accept it. Such a tall claim, requiring yet further evisceration; sublimation... into the waters of a universal compassion. Every situation yielding an understanding: a fact of WHAT IS. Why is that so powerful? And yet it is. The facticity of phenomenology empowers the mind to trust its authority. This is how IT IS. This is how WE EVOLVED. There's processes and realities beyond our trite personal evidences which override the personal stories of the mind.

More and more, emotionally, mentally, concepts of non-linearity, the wave and process feeling of embodied being, of even those breaks which eject me into labyrinth of confusions, all these still fall within a wider arc, a blissful observation tower: what is this? Who is this? It's more me than the me which suffers. Its me feeling closer to the source; living closer to the fount of knowledge, to the place of wisdom.

Life in it's whacky non-duality, mocking our linear estimations with paradox atop paradox; forcing personal intrapsychic events into dialectical motion with interpersonal inclinations; dragging the linear minded, and its culture and civilization, into a crap heap of uniformity. Feedbacks which spawn like forest fires, growing until it's disastrousness impedes upon the ground that it walks upon, the planet earth, dangling marvelously as a spherical miracle in the emptiness of space.

As I ride the wave of this enigmatic flow, I must remind myself of it's brilliant colors.