Some thoughts I had over my days off, allowing myself some chemically-aided introspection:
*When it became clear that we had people in power who preyed on mythical thinking to get people to accept “alternative facts,” it became harder for me to accept that anything good could come from thinking in mythical directions or in expecting to find a kernel of truth.
*I could no longer scrape together any enthusiasm for Western esotericism in part because the symbolic language became repulsive to me. I no longer jibed with using the same symbols as Crusader LARPers who take their inability to get laid as a sign from God to be celibate like the Templars (who weren’t even celibate. Sorry chuds). Even the more progressive Christians I knew seemed to get mired in rank-and-file liberalism and just as vulnerable to media gaslighting as the more conservative Christians.
*I felt distracted by prayer and meditation. I felt like the ascetic life was one of immense privilege and that the people around me didn’t grasp my urgency to act materially against growing threats in the world.
*Marxist dialectics made more sense to me in this moment in time than trying to find truth in some mythical worldview. It didn’t require me to ignore what I saw happening right in front of me and in the era of “post-truth” that was important.
It did required equal amounts of blind faith to be a conservative or a liberal. But to be a communist all I had to believe in was the wretchedness I saw on full display every day of my life from a capitalist society.
*There is still a part of me that longs for some kind of sublime belief, but that part of me has turned jaded and quite hopeless.
*I have never satisfactorily dissuaded myself from believing that I have lived before; only from believing that there is any word or belief or system or benevolent being who can save us from being cast again and again into an indifferent universe that will self-destruct one day and leave us in the void forever. It’s easier to live as if there is no such thing as reincarnation and write off the weirdness as pathology, even if I am nagged by the thought of it even now.
*Even if reincarnation is true I am 99% sure that not a lot can be learned from remembering past lives. We emerge as something different each time our material conditions change. We have different lives, different identities, and different times and I no longer believe in any such thing as timeless wisdom.
In short I guess it comes down to a sense of (hyper?) vigilance and a need to ground myself to something sure and solid in a world with its head firmly up its ass with mythical thinking and conspiracy theories.
Will I find balance one day? Who knows. Recently I had the thought to buy a decent keyboard and play music as a form of meditation. Maybe when my tax refund is in I can try that. I’m also making a lot of friends who are non-racist Norse Heathens. They seem pretty cool. But I am reluctant to get back into any formal system right now. I dearly wish I had a cabin in the mountains to retreat to.
Severe Deja Vu 