Still Searching

I need to understand why things like this keep happening. I shouldn't smoke weed, yet I do it. The glory and blissful like feeling with another - the want - supersedes my wiser, better self. I can have so much fun articulating ideas like these, yet enacting them, controlling the dynamics of experience, intervening at proper times, changing the flow of experience so that you don't allow yourself to fall into certain basins of attraction - this stuffs hard, difficult to tolerate: the instinct, deep within your chest, is to dissociate the pain of not getting what you want.

I can't remember how it began. I know the weed was making me paranoid and feeling negative. An "absence" in me, noticed peripherally at first, periodically 'jutted' into my attention. Talking about philosophical matters made me more self-consciousness. Each iteration, or effort to explain a feeling I was having, lead to this overbearing self consciousness, felt in the action itself, impinging on a more natural focus on what I was talking about. Feeling that, reading the effect on Jordan, silenced any strong or resilient part in me, and drew me to deeper into psychic entrainment with a negative self-state.

When we left, went to get his car clean, I was sitting in the car, thinking, worrying, feeling a 'weight' upon me - the weighing paranoia of "hearing a voice", a paranoia from a more paranoid time in my past - I didn't know that he was noticing "micro-scratches" from the brush he used to clean it. He came back in, I spoke, he didn't respond in a way that I liked. Every repetition of this effort - the intention I had to speak, and the perceived effect I seemed to be having, left marks on my physiology, an increased heat in my forehead, a feeling of compression, or perhaps decomprehension: is the blood rushing in, or away, from my frontal lobe? My attention and quality of consciousness would seem to indicate a reduction in orbitofrontal control. I gave up, psychically, and I remember the few iterations where it happened: I remember internalizing a feeling, and not having the "oomph" to contain and defuse it. It was a feeling that consciously said "I give up", and so every action became increasingly lifeless, self-conscious, guarded, tense, and rushed. This anxiety "scaffolded" what was allowed to come through in my action. My perception "knew it", WAS IT, and I have the simultaneous shame of having another person partake in this quality of experience, engendered by me and "put" into you.

No wonder people hate shame. Shame-Hate might in fact be psychical twins - neurological actions that become neurally 'linked' by inherent properties in social and emotion relations. A human can't help but naturally hate shame. On the other hand, there is another part of you: a part that can be so quiet that your stubborn intention is to dilute it's presence. Love, compassion, acceptance, tolerance. The blissful feeling, lightness and ease of patient acceptance of what is. Anger, in it's stubborness and arrogance, is symptomatic of a mind overwhelmed by shame and defends against it through projecting on an external object. Through externalizing, it displaces and thus distorts the influence of unconscious processes in social relations. Ignorance of processes like these is the root cause of pain and suffering human society.

There a comes a point in every self-conscious human beings life when he honestly addresses what he feels: his fears, his deep, naked, vulnerability before the facts of life. He looks at it, acknowledges what he sees, but instead of identifying, and thus inevitably enacting what he feels, he instead chooses - exercises a capacity that no other creature possesses: affirmation, in an action, in a choice, he decides to love himself, forgive himself, calm himself, and make new promises, and commitments, to a newer understanding. My perceptions have the dimensions of a sphere. I can see so far - I cannot see what lies beyond the horizon. The curvature of perception, like that of the earth, inhibits knowledge of what lies beyond. But we know, always, that what lies beyond is different than what is here. In the next perception, we can know, breathe, and cool the fires in our belly's. Life feels better. Your mind feels stronger. You can trust yourself to be yourself. Not as performance. Not for anyone, but for you, because you feel it, and you should defend what you feel: to be, and to let yourself to be, is the core processes at the root of "selfhood".