Twenty-two, I find myself alone. Computer-hue glowing—writing. The room is lit but the sky dark, again, like all my days. My back is worse than its ever been. I live in more pain than I ever have before. My mind drifts, worrying that the Bells Palsy that runs in my family is finally here—a running gag in my life, unsure if my muscle spams are dehydration or seizures. The future is at once grim, heavy, light, and exciting. I’ve completed my ten year goal in a quarter of the time. Heaven doesn’t seem so far away, whether that’s my mortality, like the toll of the bell ringing again; hell is an existential threat, both a reality and a self-inflicted wound, it seems.
A question bubbles: “Where does that leave us?”
An answer pops it: “And midway through my path I have devoured my sun again, the light is gone and I am left.”
I breath in, a little more difficult now with this band to support my lumbar, a tight embrace, my companion in this desert. I sip my water and write.
. . .
Currently I am re-studying Franklin Merrell-Wolff, once again. Having seen the heights of both Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner’s mystical experiences, I have come to realize I am missing a wholistic knowledge of Franklin’s project. I use his first name because I suspect, with my degree of mystical intuition, that we all would rather call each other plainly and accurately as fellows, Followers of Knowledge, of the pious, and with scrutinizing intellect to support it.
It is out of reverence I call him Franklin, not irreverence. In the following words I will at times present matters plainly, but I will try not to subtract the value my life has taught me. Even in ineloquence, or reverent patience, the value of life exists beyond the realms of either pure optimism or pure pessimism.
The Sun and its greatest magic tricks.
My furthest back memory is my birth, so I think. In those early days it has been murky, for a long time—for reasons we will divulge, eventually. I remember two colours. The light, a rounded melting feeling: abstract and bright. The dark. Void: real and cavernous.
I presume these were brought to my consciousness through the process of my physical birth and its relative trauma to the embryo I inhabited. This fetus taken from the womb, this me, had a full head of hair. 9lbs 11oz, a week after 9/11. A longstanding crude joke in my youth came about from this weird karma. I grew up in the post 9-11 world, but my generation, by the time we could properly comprehend it, the internet had surfaced. It was deconstructed in real-time.
9-11 was the subject to raunchy conspiracies—”Bush did it,” “Jet fuel can’t melt steal beams,”—the CIA was coming under heavy criticism by independent citizens through the Freedom of Information Act—web 1.0 had many interesting websites dedicated to these necessary dossiers—web 2.0 and novel media technologies were becoming prominent—documentation of M.K. Ultra was coming out in my teens—we never got a clear image of why we were in Afghanistan—many other wartime atrocities and the horror of the now gone Live-Leak videos desensitized us, like virtual assassins—soldiers gave personal stories of the horror of the War on Terror—the mixture of all these events, coinciding along with the development of other key moments in our youth, led the rest of us Y2K babies led to a strange place. What use is tradition? How many in the middle east did we kill based from the two thousand or so on our own soil? From our own soldiers we were sending out there?
War was subversive, complex. Nothing was simple. How many more did the CIA slaughter in their numerous failed coups to install right wing dictators, ruining so many cultures themselves? In these early days it seemed the sins we were learning outweighed the prescience of the good our government had done—hence myself feeling, even weirdly correct, in my own crude jokes, deconstructing of this tragedy. It is still a tragedy nonetheless and deserves our respect. Even if 9-11 has been thoroughly deconstructed (rightfully or not) in its faith, in the practice of its use for starting wars, in our remembrance of it (in recent years), in the governmental expressions surrounding it, the presidency, the broader faith in the Intelligence Community et cetera.
No one understood much of this phenomenon, only wistful grasping—and the prominence of both me being born with a full head of hair, like I was stewing, waiting for a week to pass before I birthed myself, heavy-set and massive, is certainly humorous. But only juxtaposed to the insanity of the situation. It was as if I was premeditating my own demise, finding a time and a weight to birth myself the most evil way I could. I would later hide myself behind humour, behind the horror. It was easier than dealing with the true consequences of what those events meant to everyone involved. Even though I did take it upon myself to try to protect the true tragedy of it later, when I was 16 or so, studying every historical evil our Intelligence Community committed.
My sensibilities have changed and I have not made a joke like that in a very long time, so looking back at this time it is a necessity to expound upon the environment I was raised in. My generation. Much like how Gen X berates and harasses my own generation for being “lazy”—when the statistics, and common sense, suggest Gen X were gift wrapped a reality much simpler than ours. Everywhere surrounding my birth, my reaction to it, its uncanny significance to one of our most important tragedies in this nation’s recent memory is ironic. It smells of egoism now, and not having enough proper leaders in my own life, and in general in that time period. As I socialized myself more and rediscovered the hope, the sun that seems so deep in my memories, my true birth, not the data that surrounds my birth, ever becomes more important to me and my consciousness than this.
. . .
The second circumstance that must be discussed about my early life was my abuse. I was heavily psychologically abused by my biological father. Screaming matches—likely before I could walk, I would grow so red in the face as to pass out. Never backing down—I suspect my sense of language developed here. I remember overhearing my parents divorce, I was so small, aware of my vulnerability, but not necessarily scared; playing with my power ranger yellow lighting-like tiger toy. I remember looking up, seeing them around the corner, then shifting my gaze down immediately—something very primal in me knew what was happening. This was a dangerous and depressing intuition. My ears grew hot, I quiet, playing with my toy, listening. I don’t remember anything else. Except perhaps that Van Gough painting hung on the wall. All I have left are fragmentary dreams of very unsafe rides with my father that haunted me through my teens.
As I have pieced together my memories through the years, like a jigsaw puzzle, I remember being taught every curse under that desert sun. Looking back, it was truly nearly every swear imaginable. I remember Arizona. I am told I only flew there, once, as a baby, but the memories are there. That is where I learned many of my curses, which I would later use against my mothers boyfriends, in those first couple years. Another shame of mine. Desensitized at birth by another, closer and directly intimate tragedy. Part of my insentience on linguistic accuracy comes from this shame. I was yelled at in school for using even my most tame expressions of my discomfort. Altering so much of my language I was shocked at the shock of others. I was molded into an animal from my father under that desert sun.
As I get older I understand where they are coming from. I must have been monstrous. I was terrifyingly composed and masterful of everything once I got it. For example, I had trouble walking a bit, at first. Fairly normal for my age at the time. But my mom says to me how shocked she was to come home, randomly, to me running around the house! Like magic! ‘I had just decided I had enough and begun to run.’
My expression of curtseys, of hesitancy and composure made me seem older than I was: afflicted with a very large body, and an old face, this led to even more problems. Monstrous. Wild, Untamable. Driven by an adventurous soul, bold, and fearful of no one, I was given weapons of words too young, I was given a body to advanced—now with its downsides coming in force in my current life—every instance of my birth and childhood I was shamed. My existence was shameful.
My mother had trouble raising me, as this psychology I developed perverted my sense of right and wrong. How was I to deal with these circumstances, how was I to think of it all? If I was handled too much I was interpreting you as evil and patently calling me unknowledgeable and destructive—which while a definite reality of my life, it certainly wasn’t true of her. Yet I grew increasingly depressive when left along to my own devices. Few things challenged me as I got older. This psychology, its trauma, still comes up and affects me nowadays—inwardly. Although now, having studied enough mysticism, and taken it upon myself to attain neigh infinite strength—to become almost dictator like in my self mastery, to say to world, “I am enough!”—peace never seemed to arrive when I thought it would matter. Happiness was made—and it was far off. It wasn’t until after my psychological break from reality after my biological father’s death and wake, at 18, did I finally begin on a path to peace. But that is long down the road. Even more troubling circumstances. Nothing was made easy.
(. . . I cry now, thinking back. I let the tears take over. I know soon I will engage in a mysticism to heal these wounds, but first they must come to my awareness, before I can surgically work upon them and transcend further. My work is never done. For they are right, I was a monster. Now I try to make my weaknesses into points of inspiration. For myself and others.)
All of these events subsumed me and my sense of identity. It wasn’t that I ever felt, per se, unreal, but it seemed exactly the opposite. I was too real. I had too much baggage. Too much history. And no one who was wise enough seemed to care or know how to fix that. It was as if everyone said, “poof” and disappeared all of a sudden. So I developed an acute extroversion. I was recounted this story and only remember it a little bit, as it was not a huge deal at the time: there was a day at the supermarket and my mom and I had met this immigrant family. In a strange attempt to learn their language, I simply walked up to the other kid and tried to pronounce the things they did, pointing and trying to find shared language. So we could talk. Both of the parents found it really amusing but also cute. Looking back, that warm, abstract light, this memory—this was my sun. And the types of experience I lean on in my, well, startlingly older dispositions.
Experiences like this, defined my politics as I got older. If I sensed that in some way we, as a culture, were not being cognizant of others, we were falsifying history. Since I could talk I have had to withstand the horror of listening to normal people recount their “horrible” childhoods—idyllic compared to my baseline—boring and pompous. Dictating their egoisms. However, I learned, by confronting this feeling against my sun, that we are simply given our own sun and our forced to eat it. Every single one of us knows the joys and love in our life, our ideal realities. What makes life worth living is that each of us is our own dream in and of ourselves, and we must devour our sun to enjoy the suns of others. The light, the hope they bring. If you cannot do this, you are not real and bring a self inflicted hell upon yourself and upon others. It is precisely out of love for others we should act. When we do not do this, and pursue attachment, is when we think our sins better than others, our suns more glorious.
Pulling the rabbit out of the hat.
Obviously I have outlined my early childhood. Thankfully to my mother, who had done well to give me a life well lived away from that hell, has carved out a garden for me to work upon myself—even if for a long time we had trouble communicating. I have also grown thankful, as well, to my dad—the one who married my mom and adopted me—for not sacrificing himself in the process of trying to do the same. Obviously we were dysfunctional, obviously everyone is in some way. However, that doesn’t mean we stay that way. Specifically my immediate family has grown up and out of a lot of our previous bad habits. So, for that reason I won’t go into any of that.
I have also realized that the problems in my teen years, while they felt terrible in the moment, I have actually grown exponentially outside of. The people we were then are so far beneath us that it is far better, spiritually, and praxeologically, to focus instead on the way independence is gained.
I have loved many people and things. I have seen many deaths, even attended my biological father’s funeral. But I think I can submit it all into one easy breath: to live is the greatest gift to all. The suffering inherent in recognizing the light in others, as well as the greater suffering we inflict upon ourselves when we lose our own light. You will be attacked by life and by others, but do not treat that ever as a reason to let go and escape this beautiful life.
My biological father was unhinged, spiraling, and murdered someone in his final moments. Could never visit me because he had a warrant out for arrest for stabbing a man in my lovely Iowa—a pain to think about now. He had to have a bandana over his head during the open casket portion of the funeral, his ice-cold face forever seared in my memory—the funeral had happened a very long time after his actual death because of the investigation, and thus the excessive appearance to an eagle-eyed person like me. That bandana was there precisely because he was rightfully shot in response to killing that man. So many hurtful things, that ruined whatever good that wake could have had—instead it was shocking due to the circumstances of his own short-sided death.
I was planning to visit my father—I was freshly 18—and a week later I hear my mom walk down to my room—I know instantly what happened.
I had a friend of mine who in recent memory took his own life. It was almost clairvoyant. I saw this deep suffering in my friend as well. I was the only one, that night. I thought he had the strength like I did, though.
He loved to help people to a fault, and frustrated himself when he was never enough. So, we were discussing my recent reading of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. I painted a glorious picture of the universe, having went through many existential crisis and suicide attempts myself. I had thought Sisyphus was at least in part iconographic to both of our afflictions. It was therapeutic. However, he and I disagreed in the end. He thought the universe had no meaning and was random. That was the last I saw him. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus itself is dark, I prefer Camus’ later essays in that book, they are much grander and imaginative. I only learned that in the interim, waiting for his return. I worry sometimes that my strength may have crushed what little light he had left, that he decided he had enough. Like a turn of a key. I wretched with it often, much like the seeming hopelessness of my father’s death.
I have been on that door many times, and it threw me to tears. There are times now when I am forced to view all my own self-harm and attempts in a different light. My arms light up, and I realize the only way for me to be able to help these people truly is to try and lead them by overcoming these feelings completely. The closer I get to trying to help the more I realize that to help, sometimes, it means destroying yourself. In an unhelpful way, too. In my father’s case, it made me realize that not all people can be saved. And that he might have killed me, too. He and his father had annual brawls. I decided to come to terms with the fact that it was out of my control, but for some reason this still seemed like I messed up. There was always more to unearth from that experience.
With my friend, a therapist would tell me, “there’s no way you could have known.” True. Yet I did. And what I did was useless. I’ve come to realize, the more I keep to myself the worse these things get. I can see all the deepness in the world, but the best course would have been to simply share, in the moment, rather than assuming, if he was alright. Or to try and convey my worries to others who knew him better.
What should you do if you struggle with strength? Accept that you need time alone, and accept that you need help. We must try, but its futile to destroy yourself senselessly.
I actively inhabit this everyday, and am trying my best. The Buddha, through the buddha-body of perfect emanation, was said to teach the dharma to his mother in heaven. I have attained that same body, and only until now was I convinced of its use. To incarnate “perfection” is not to be perfect but to share. When the Buddha opens his mind, away from his physical body, then he is able to teach his mother the dharma. In more oblique egoistic terms, we could say, the image and culture that his mother left on this earth, leaves traces. Traces in the rituals she left for others, traces in these realms of the spirit. The Buddha no longer assumes, in ignorance, that because she is dead she is gone and “unredeemable”. Whatever karma she is that leads to her rebirth, he works upon the world to ensure she can be led into heaven. In the same way, the death of my friend gives me hope and he still brought with him a light of his own that he taught me—none of us can do this alone. From that point on I was never the same. I felt distinctly that I was doing him proud, his legacy well, with the path I was now traveling on. “If the universe is random then we as people are what make it right,” is what I would say to him now. We must have each other. It is why the Buddha turns down complete Nirvana—as Aurobindo notes—so he can continue to help others—we cannot ignore the dharma. All else is suffering.
Deathless; Enshrinement; Grateful.
Devour the sun and the sun-devourers. Never stop aspiring. The days we relinquish our hope is the day we relinquish all chance of hope at all. We grow complacent and lose in other ways that become dangerous, subtly, to the hope, the power and grace of others. Become the flaming sun, sharing its warmth with others. Entice the heat, the pain, and its absolution. Enjoy and love. Be at peace and make amends where it makes sense. Take upon the gift of giving for others, lifting them up with you. Smile. Laugh. Cry.
Be. Never stop being. You are a gift to so many—use your life, be this life in its actual continuum! Don’t shy away, unless if you need it, for the time being. Aspire, always. Pray if you need, and ask for help.