Avoiding the void, and more on transcendence...

Google glasses are over; the desire for protection from reality is always with us.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Modifications by Janina Lamb.

A fullness too full to comprehend…

The void we avoid isn’t really a void; it’s a fullness too full to comprehend. It’s where we get our minds blown and our hearts opened and/or endure emotional pain and fear. Edvard Munch’s painting depicts the overwhelm of not knowing, of mystery, of what we can’t control, and my modification depicts how we try to protect ourselves from this and how it doesn’t work. The guy is still screaming.

As much as I like to think that I crave transcendence, I’m always looking for something to take the edge off. The edge being my fear. I’m way too addicted to social media and other amusements as a form of benzodiazepine. Actual drugs are helpful, too. And stories—either moving pictures or words/pictures on a page. Anything that allows me to check out for a little while from the raw terror of being alive. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m not.

Trying to negotiate a limbic-brained instinct to survive with what I experience as a desire to transcend my own awareness, all the while being assaulted, not only with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including ancestral slings and arrows, but with the incessant static of lies about what I can buy with money that will fix everything, is frustratingly difficult.

How are we supposed to figure anything out with this going on:

You can’t buy transcendence online.

It hasn’t gotten easier since we started walking around on two legs. Not as many hungry tigers but way too much matrix. And plenty of hungry tiger equivalents.

There are many fine folk offering formulas, tips, and methods for greater self-awareness and integration, that may indeed be helpful. You can buy a vibrating stress relief device online, but you can’t buy transcendence. Transcendence is not a thing.

It’s not a destination either. It’s a next step in a gradual reorganization of self that takes more into account than the last iteration of self. Transcendence is a movement towards integration on a larger field of awareness. What is being transcended is the last iteration.

Ay, there’s the rub. To allow myself to enter territory beyond my habits of self-protection is often to feel pain/sadness/grief. Accepting these feelings, unbinding them, unblinding them, is the beginning of self-acceptance and an intensified ability to respond to the questions asked of me by life.

The real abrasion is that there is no integration of self, no enlightenment, no transcendence, that protects me from the vulnerability of being human. In fact, just the opposite. The more open to reality I am, the more reality I get, gosh darn it.

Reality is not always this gorgeous…

It is only when vulnerability feels safer to me than the alternative of holding my hands over my ears and screaming, that I guess you could say it hurts so good. Okay, maybe ‘safer’ isn’t quite the right word, at least not without some explanation.

My awareness will always be compromised by my human condition: blood and meat and bone, fear and desire, aches and pains, a physical arc that leads towards deterioration and death, while my spirit longs for transcendence and release. I wrestle with this compromise every day.

I ask questions. What do I love more than I fear, and vice versa? What is my responsibility? Who/what do I serve? Who/what do I obey (or at least take suggestions from)?

These are not theoretical questions; these are the questions I answer in my actions, or lack thereof. An action can be as quiet and simple as a prayerful intention. I use the word “prayerful” in the sense that sometimes the most I can do is express my yearning to move in a certain direction, like moving a dial to a certain setting (the mechanical analogy betrays my age) and having faith that the yearning/setting will move me in that direction.

Which brings me to explain what I mean by vulnerability feeling safer than screaming. I think what it means is that if and when I can loosen up my limbic fear of death (which finds its form in fear of identity death), it becomes clear that I desire to align myself with a field of awareness that transcends identity. And the more real that field appears to me, the safer I feel in perceiving myself as part of it, rather than depending on anxiety to protect me from it.

That may not be the greatest explanation, but it’s a start. I’ll keep trying. For now, let’s just say that love casts out fear and being human is all we’ve got to work with...

Knowledge studies others,
Wisdom is self-known;
Muscle masters brothers,
Self-mastery is bone;
Content need never borrow,
Ambition wanders blind:
Vitality cleaves to the marrow
Leaving death behind.

The Way of Life, by Lao Tzu, translated by Witter Bynner

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Transcendence, Part 1 (if you missed it).

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A little more…

It’s a beautiful morning. Everyone around here is digging out from a two-foot snowstorm. These are the little challenges. The big challenges are the ones that confront life and limb and heart.

I am well aware that our world is full of profound suffering. I am well aware that there is so much that is wrong, caused by humans, so many harmful actions taken out of fear and greed and blindness to real cause and effect.

I am well aware that writing about transcendence, about interior awareness, is a luxury. It’s a luxury to have the time and space without any hungry tigers around to ponder one’s relationship with life itself.

I also feel that if there is any lasting solution to man’s inhumanity to man, and to himself, it awaits a collective mass of individual self-awareness. That’s why I have faith in art. What I’m calling art is awareness made visible. I’m using the word 'art' to mean any creation or action that is imbued with a desire for transcendence, for opening, and that opens up space for others to feel that sweet desire in their hearts and bodies.