My electronic journal. What more is there to say?

Saturday, April 29, 2000 9:57 a.m.

I haven't written anything in here for over a year. Here are some philosophical ramblings that I have been inspired to write out by a class in Asian Philosophy which recently ended *sniffles*. See if you can follow it. Please let me know if any of this strikes a nerve with you; it all is so essential to me, and I haven't found anyone else who feels this way. So, here goes nothing...

4/27/00

There is a part of the psyche which a lot of people leaning towards the Eastern mindset discover, through various mediums; through psychedelic drugs, through meditation, through stoic denial of bodily needs and wants, etc. That contentless awareness, that soul from which springs truth, that unchangeable, undamageable Self that can only reach out and can never be penetrated, alter, wounded or scarred-- that thing which is in all of us, the one true Self, that makes life in this place possible. That Self, that one giant soul which we all share, is purely positive. Its substance contains no malice, no murder, no beginnings and no ends, no greed, no want, no death, no pain, and absolutely +nothing+ negative. But, as you put it, it can +frame+ the negative. We experience anything and everything from that place, and it is the platform where negative things can happen; it is the constant that allows our Ego to be in constant flux, ever changing and grown, as it must; understanding that it's there allows us to really +experience+ negative events, knowing that it won't +damage+ us. It may hurt, but it can't +harm+. The positive can always frame the negative, for it is bigger than the negative; the negative can never hold, can never bridle or stifle the positive-- it is far too big for the negative to handle.
There is an infinite, formless, indescribable kind of calm to be found in that understanding. It is the wellspring of patience, compassion, and gentleness-- for others, yes, but most importantly, for yourself. It is the peace you need to live and grow and change without fighting, without rigorous and unforgiving discipline or training, without conquest or combat, of any kind. Because, when you really look at things, it can't help but make itself known to you that nothing, NOTHING, is really competing in this world.
Think of what we call "good" and what we call "evil." Think of "virtue" and "vice;" think of "pleasure" and "pain;" think of "love" and "hate," "black" and "white," "up" and "down"-- all these things, we try to make into opposing entities, competing with one another for dominance, one preferable to the other, using the world and all its contents to battle and try and overcome the other. But they're +not+ opposites, not really. They're made of the same stuff. They compliment each other, they complete each other, they make each other possible. Neither will ever succeed in getting rid of the other, +nor are any of them trying+. Competition, opposition, hierarchy of superior to inferior-- these things have NO SUBSTANCE, no existence but what we give them. Marcus Aurelius once said, "Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears." Reject your sense of competition, and competition no longer exists. Be it the seeming struggle between the hawk and the mouse for life, the negative experiences that seem to be conspiring against us-- Once we see them for what they are, there is no opposition in existence anywhere. There is no eternal struggle, there is no triumph or failure, there is no conqueror and no conquered; we all exist in one great, complimentary whole, accompanying each other on the same journey, from the same place, to the same place, all together, all at once, all times and all people, infinitesimally and eternally.

4/21/00

During and immediately following a conflict with my boyfriend a couple weeks ago, I had a sort of epiphany, the depths of which I think I still have yet to fathom. The particulars of the conflict are unimportant, but the chain reaction it started in my mind and heart are quite unique and significant.
I committed a rather minor transgression, which spurned in David (my boyfriend) some rather major emotional effects. He called me terribly upset one night and I immediately felt horrible; I felt the need to apologize over and over, to offer various kinds of penance and compensation, inwardly criticizing myself, hurting more deeply and feeling more sorry than I ever had in my life. By the time we got off the phone several hours later, it had grown quite late, and though he had been calmed and reassured, I had been rather shaken. I couldn't forgive myself for what I'd done and continued to call myself names and beat myself up even after I had been assured many times of his forgiveness.
But as it was very late, and I was very tired, I soon started drifting off into sleep. The closer I got to sleep, the sharper my mind got, and the more it became apparent that feeling so guilty and torturing myself was such a strenuous effort. My mind drifted to other things as I allowed it, and I felt none of the whirlwind of emotions the earlier conversations had brought on. I toyed with a few concerns with an extraordinarily (in the most literal sense of the word) calm mind, seemingly detached from the horrible incident already.
When I awoke in the morning, the subject still bothered me. In my "fully awake" state, it was easy for me to slip into the self-deprecating patterns of blame and guilt and penance, and it took effort to steer myself away from those automatic routes and to really think about the whole thing with some semblance of objectiveness. When my mind was calm and clear, I didn't feel guilty. That didn't change the fact that what I had done was wrong and that I shouldn't have done it, but I didn't feel a need to hate myself for it. I could forgive myself amidst that clarity, and not forget but just move on without the memory torturing me. By the time I got home from school, I was pretty much at peace with it.
Looking for some notebook or something to write down my thoughts that afternoon, I found an old volume from a year or so ago containing some rather angry and depressive poetry that I had forgotten I'd even written. One of the lines that stuck out to me like a huge red sign was the last line I had scribbled in a half-finished tirade: "People don't ever seem to understand the depth of my hatred for myself."
Ouch. That was biting. I could remember that pain, that anguish; I could remember where I was then, but I didn't feel it. It didn't hurt me much to read that line. But it did trigger a realization that had been a long time in coming.
Up until that point, I hadn't really realized how much of my personality was based on hating myself. Some of the basic concepts that had defined my ego-self had been unworthiness, sin, alienation, subordination, victimization. The patterns those tendencies had scrawled as scars on my personality are still present and active. But they just don't hold the fire or the urgency they used to have. Even the emotions I was experiencing-- guilt, sorrow, pain-- didn't seem as distressing as they once did; I wasn't "in pain," but rather the pain was in me, and there was more of me that the pain didn't touch. It wasn't vital; it wasn't in the deepest part of me. And I didn't know what to make of it. I'd never been in a situation like that before, and it was a little scary. Initially, I panicked, but that subsided. So I was left facing something that I had never known with absolutely no idea of how to handle it.
I was typing out an e-mail to my boyfriend trying to tell him all of this a few days after the initial conversation, and I paused, trying to think of what else to say. I looked down at my hands that were then in my lap. A wave of wonder swept over me, looking at my hands, as I simultaneously felt at home in them and separate from them. In the wake of the wonder came a strange calm, a reassurance that there was no need to be afraid.
I suddenly felt a unity with my body that I'd never felt before, with my own body and the matter that made up everything else. I could almost hear everything sigh out "ohm" in a great benign existence, an almost-syllable escaping the Mona Lisa smile of everything around me. It was tantalizing. And since then, two worlds which we as human beings inhabit have become clearer and clearer to me:

The spirit is silent and akin to heat and light. It warms and glows like the sun. It is shared by all living things, and it connects all living things; the trees, the grass, the worms, the squirrels, the cats, the horses, the people. It is the substance which people want to block off and ration and call the "soul," but the separation of spirit from spirit is impossible. It is indivisible and indestructible; nothing in the material or emotional world can harm it. It beams forth from beings at peace so as to bathe everyone and everything in its warmth and light.
The body is akin to sound; if one is only quiet enough, the ringing in one's ears ceases to be ringing and can be heard as the great sacred "ohm" exhaling from all things. Think of that sacred syllable as the sound that emanates from the constant vibration of the atoms and their parts which make up all the matter in the universe. The miracles of physical growth and renewal, of the mineral cycle, the conservation of mass, the food web-- all of these things are united in physical reality, and we share in all of it.

1/27/00

In my various reading and general reflection about society and thought in the Western world (I know that's vague, but I can't trace the exact train of thought), I have noticed a tendency for the more traditional Western mind to see things that are separate or "opposite" as necessarily opposed or competing. Sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes it is subtle, but it is often there. Man, instead of working with Nature, sees himself removed from it and seeks to conquer it. The "forces of good" and the "forces of evil" (i.e. God and the Devil as personified in the Judeo-Christian tradition) are constantly battling each other, one trying to defeat the other in different ways to reign over the entire world. Kierkegaard (and others, I'm sure) saw Man's separation from God (the initial Fall) to mean that Man was by nature opposed to God. This tendency is even reflected somewhat in the old adage, "If you're not for us, you're against us." The conflict is always somewhat aggravated and aggressive. I'm sure there are more examples, and plenty of counterexamples, but still, I feel this tendency is there.
In Asian philosophy, I don't get the same sense of competing or opposing entities. First, things that are often considered separate in Western thought aren't considered so separated in Eastern thought, such as Man and God, or Man and Nature. Even then, things that are considered to be opposites-- nirvana and samsara, for example-- do not compete but simply exist, separate, complimenting each other. They can even be said to wrestle with one another at times, but the conflict is not so aggressive; it is more passive, more neutral; it just sort of "happens," naturally. One is never attacking the other.

Tuesday, March 31, 1999 8:34 p.m.

I think loving someone you can't have is a wierd form of projection, especially for depressives, like myself, and people who don't know or don't want to admit what's wrong in their lives. You find someone who you think would be the solution to everything-- "Oh, if I only had this person, I would be happy again"-- even though you know they are inaccessible to you. So then you refocus your depression on the fact that they are inaccessible to you, so you have something if not concrete, at least definable, that is wrong. There's no longer that... vaccuum. Or rather, the vaccuum is still there, but now you have a hose: loneliness. Although that loneliness usually is more an effect than a cause of depression. I know that's how it is with me. With every passing second the desire for everyone in my life to just leave me the fuck alone grows exponentially, but I'm still lonely. I still sneer bitterly at happy couples walking hand-and-hand down the hall, or hugging, or kissing. Kissing is the worst. Gods, I hate love.
This guy in my Civics class just got dumped by his girlfriend of a year. I can only imagine how much that must hurt. He had such a short fuse today; he was snappy, snitty, talking about how much hated women and how he wanted to kill them all. She hurt him bad. Hearing him ramble called once more to the surface how much I miss having a boyfriend. I mentioned it to Pam and she said Brandon & I should hook up. Yeah, right. If she saw how he hangs all over Jen then she'd know he'd never go for a girl like me. Not that he's any huge catch. But Pat... *sighs* Susan is a lucky girl.
I just realized I'm talking about these people who you have no idea about. I apologize.
Pat is short, pudgy, not particularly "hot" (gods, i hate that word) but one of the sweetest guys I know. He's one of the few people in the junior class with a shred of independent thought in his head... Which is probably what attracts me to him so much. And also possibly the fact that he has a girlfriend. Although I think I'd be just as reluctant to say anything even if he didn't. I'm just like that I guess. All talk and no action... "Wish i could be more like the ocean." If only.
I'm gonna shut up now. All this rambling about loneliness and romance isn't going to help my quickly dwindling will to live. Wish me luck.

"Sex is violent"

Friday, August 12, 1998 10:19 p.m.

To say these journal entries are few and far between would be an understatement, huh? Well, anyway... I've just relieved some tension that's been building for a long time... I hope things turn out for the best, but the cosmic dust has yet to settle... here's my two cents for the day.

"24 hours"
-the Sundays

few true cares have I
as the world turns round
I was blind but
now I'm still blind

too few cares have I
as the world turns sour
I was blind but
now I'm still blind

I liked you for 24 hours
in your house
& when the time has come to live again
I shall

& I liked you for 24 hours
in your house
& now the time has come to live again
I shall

I liked you but that was before
why me?
I never knew then
& I don't know now

all the things you do
all come back to you
that's why I hung back but
I'll say what I like now

"Don't speak to me about truth-- I know you're lying."

Friday, May 1st, 1998 7:20 p.m.

I LOVE THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND. There's no two ways about it. They are the most awesome band on the planet. (And that's my two cents about music for today.)
I am SO tired right now. I have gotten maybe a total of 15 hours of sleep this week. I've been running myself ragged trying to get ready for this trip to Europe I'm taking in July. [sigh] I need to give myself a break!
More later... I swear!

"we search for absolutes where there are absolutely none"

Wednesday, February 25th, 1998 5:08 pm

My mouth hurts.
That's about the only thought that's paraded through my head all day. I went to the orthodontist yesterday and they put ten million spacers between my teeth. And since they move ALL your teeth around, your ENTIRE jaw hurts when you get these things. I hate having braces. I have my third-to-last appointment next Wednesday, and I should be getting these horrible things off within six months... sigh... My head hurts... I can't even think straight... Ugh!!!
Rediscovered my love for Jane's Addiction today listening to "Nothing's Shocking"- one of the absolute best rock albums from the last, say, fifteen years. Perry Farrell is simply insane- there's no other way to describe it. Definitely somebody I'd like to meet someday. Him and Dave Navarro. But you don't even wanna get me started on Dave Navarro....
Please hold while I escape to a daydream for a few moments...
Okay, I'm back. Anyway, just wanted to say that my friend Lisa's got a page up now. It's not anywhere close to being done, but when it is, I'll put a proper link up on my page. [Maybe by then, I'll be printing more worthwhile.] If you want to check it out, she's at /Area51/Labyrinth/5437/ , so, y'know... anyway...
"The news is/ Just another show/ With sex and violence... Nothing's shocking..." -"Ted, Just Admit It"
-deneys

"ocean size"
©1988 Jane's Addiction

wish i was ocean size
they cannot move you
no one tries
no one pulls you
out from your hole
like a tooth aching a jawbone

i was made with a heart of stone
to be broken
with one hard blow
i've seen the ocean
break on the shore
come together with no harm done

it ain't easy living...

i want to be
as deep as the ocean
mother ocean

some people tell me
home is in the sky
in the sky lives a spy
i want to be more like the ocean
no talk & all action
no talking, all action...

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