Me Again?
I woke up this morning and for the first time in years felt like "me." I don't know what me is or what exactly that is, but I feel like the person I used to be a long time ago, in a better time. I expected that it would take some time to recovery from a psychotic illness, but even though my life has been "normal" for a while now - job, car, girlfriend, college, etc. I've had a nagging feeling that I couldn't get back to the person I was. I'd become plagued with worry about everything. I would have spells, it took me a while to figure out they were episodes and that often there was nothing in particular to worry about. So I guess you could call them worry attacks, fits of irritability and fearfulness. Sometimes you're in something so long you forget it's not normal. I think I knew this, I just felt that, past a certain point it was out of my control. I could take medication, exercise, eat some well, adopt health relationship models, but I there's a point past which I can't really do a whole hell of a lot except work with what I have. And yet today I see that it's still there. I'm still there, what "I" is. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with who I was before, maybe I needed to be those people. Maybe I needed go through those transitions and personality changes. Maybe this was part of the recovery.
I know I've come a long way. Usually at the beginning of a semester I have this dread for the first couple weeks. This time the dread lasted all of two days. I've had my reading done for class before they even met for the first day. I am on top of shit, that's for sure.
But I digress. The question is why do I feel different? I don't know if it's simply that I've been sleeping better or I've better learned all these effective habits. But I can think of something strange that may or may not have something to do with. I began praying again. The other day I was laying on my rocking bench on my patio and I felt very in tune with the universe, very at peace. I honestly would have slept out there, but it seemed like it might storm. I didn't really want to go to bed, I just wanted to lie in the dark in this peaceful state. Spontaneously I decided to pray. Now I haven't prayed in God only knows how long (pun intended). And this is a strange admission for someone who doesn't believe in a personal deity or really deity for that matter. But it felt good to do.
One obvious interpretation is psychoanalytic. Conscious beings are self-transcendent. That is to say, their nature is in a constant change, so as they attempt to understand themselves, they change what they are observing. But that being the case, we could imagine that they have disparate parts of themselves, as psychoanalysis has, which can only be communicated to through strange and primitive mythology and symbolism. We can explain the survival of organized religion because it is a form of self-government and regulating human behavior. It then serves a function regardless of belief. We are harder pressed to explain the survival of primitive religions, which while often serving some social function, are far more limited in scope.
It struck me a bit when I went to a Hindu temple. How they are not polytheists, they are actually monists and so believe that everything is a manifestation of the divine. This then frees them to use anthropomorphic stories because they understand that it is their way of relating to the divine. They do not possess the illusions that monotheists do about their mythology.
In seeing this vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism started to make more sense to me. They used mythological Buddhas and bodhisattvas as objects of contemplation because this is what the human mind readily works with. And maybe that's ultimately what religion is, it works for people, they don't know why and they don't care.
There are obvious scientific explanations, and I think all of them are reconcilable with science, but like meditation, this objective description will never capture the nuanced subjective reality which each individual experiences. To you it doesn't matter that your life changing epiphany would register on an MRI. So this is where I am at. I will play with it and rule out no possibilities. I don't believe in miracles, I don't believe people can fly, I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe that people are a mystery to themselves and that they have to approach themselves as they would alien civilization - complete awareness and openness to possibility. And maybe this is part of the process of becoming "me" again. Whatever that is.
I know I've come a long way. Usually at the beginning of a semester I have this dread for the first couple weeks. This time the dread lasted all of two days. I've had my reading done for class before they even met for the first day. I am on top of shit, that's for sure.
But I digress. The question is why do I feel different? I don't know if it's simply that I've been sleeping better or I've better learned all these effective habits. But I can think of something strange that may or may not have something to do with. I began praying again. The other day I was laying on my rocking bench on my patio and I felt very in tune with the universe, very at peace. I honestly would have slept out there, but it seemed like it might storm. I didn't really want to go to bed, I just wanted to lie in the dark in this peaceful state. Spontaneously I decided to pray. Now I haven't prayed in God only knows how long (pun intended). And this is a strange admission for someone who doesn't believe in a personal deity or really deity for that matter. But it felt good to do.
One obvious interpretation is psychoanalytic. Conscious beings are self-transcendent. That is to say, their nature is in a constant change, so as they attempt to understand themselves, they change what they are observing. But that being the case, we could imagine that they have disparate parts of themselves, as psychoanalysis has, which can only be communicated to through strange and primitive mythology and symbolism. We can explain the survival of organized religion because it is a form of self-government and regulating human behavior. It then serves a function regardless of belief. We are harder pressed to explain the survival of primitive religions, which while often serving some social function, are far more limited in scope.
It struck me a bit when I went to a Hindu temple. How they are not polytheists, they are actually monists and so believe that everything is a manifestation of the divine. This then frees them to use anthropomorphic stories because they understand that it is their way of relating to the divine. They do not possess the illusions that monotheists do about their mythology.
In seeing this vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism started to make more sense to me. They used mythological Buddhas and bodhisattvas as objects of contemplation because this is what the human mind readily works with. And maybe that's ultimately what religion is, it works for people, they don't know why and they don't care.
There are obvious scientific explanations, and I think all of them are reconcilable with science, but like meditation, this objective description will never capture the nuanced subjective reality which each individual experiences. To you it doesn't matter that your life changing epiphany would register on an MRI. So this is where I am at. I will play with it and rule out no possibilities. I don't believe in miracles, I don't believe people can fly, I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe that people are a mystery to themselves and that they have to approach themselves as they would alien civilization - complete awareness and openness to possibility. And maybe this is part of the process of becoming "me" again. Whatever that is.