I think I'll stick with my new web home for now. It's http://mellowcricket.wordpress.com/. Hope all are well.
I have sensed the Void since I was about five years old. My mother, sister, and I came home one night to discover that, while we had been gone, my father had torn the living room to shreds. My mother said, "Let's clean it up," and while my sister (who was about three) helped out, I simply stood there in horror. My mother scolded me for not pitching in, but I couldn't move. That was my first moment of paralysis.
My most recent was this morning. My sister was not well, and needed to travel to Chicago. I took the lead, said I would accompany her, but when it came time, I was paralyzed. I couldn't even get past my front door.
I think what I saw when I was five was the Void.
The first time I became consciously aware of the Void, I was fifteen years old. I was in my room at a mental hospital, after lights-out, secretly listening to a Cure tape on my little tape player. It was hidden under my pillow. I don't remember which song it was, possibly "Kyoto Song", but I suddenly could hear the silence inside the song.
Cure songs are layered. That's their secret. If you can imagine five or six grids lying one on top of another, there is still space left, and I could hear that space. I was terrified. I understood that, in between the living moments, are the dead moments, the Void. Over time, I've felt that void, over and over again.
My first clear vision of it was sitting in my mother's car, watching her sit inside a Domino's pizza place, waiting for our order. I saw something indescribably sad, in her defeated, slumping posture, almost felt her aura of emptiness and pain. She seemed, for the first time to me, as if she were a broken shell of a woman. Still in there, still fighting, still surviving, but essentially living in defeat. I was heartbroken to see that. I see it every day now. I saw it tonight, as she climbed off the Amtrak train, barely able to walk, having stepped up to rescue my sister when I was too paralyzed to do so.
Love the person, hate the disease.
Love life, hate nothingness. That is really how it is with me, but nothingness is all around. Because what is the Void? I think it is evil ... and what is evil? I think it is the absence of good. I think the only real force in this cosmos is love, and if love is not present, nothingness is present.
After all, we can see, when it does not directly affect us, that those who hurt others are themselves hurting. People who do wrong have had wrong done to them. No one was truly evil at heart, at the beginning of their lives, but if the heart is gone in them ... if they simply can't get in touch with the love out there, then they can become evil at heart. Or simply be so selfish as to be a destructive force. So selfish as to not be able to distinguish between right and wrong. That is the absence of love. It is nothingness ... the Void.
A friend of mine, who was Buddhist for a while, used to tell me about how virtually everything was empty space. If a proton and a neutron are two tennis balls in a football field, the electron is a speck of sand at the top of the bleachers. Possibly even that scale is not dramatic enough. Perhaps we should consider an airport, or even a city. We are all virtually empty space. What does that mean, though? He never told me, and I've never seen the significance of it, except to note, to myself, that it may speak to this void that I perceive. It may simply be a metaphor for the emptiness inside life, or underlying it, but I don't know. Buddhists talk about the Void as a good thing, to be accepted ... I think as a substitute for God. No matter what, I see the Void as the opposite of God. To me, the Void is what scripture has referred to, allegorically, as Satan. To me, Satan is not God's opposite number, but the opposite of God literally; God being all that is life, and life being all love.
I think I saw in my parents' violent, disturbed life, and my own seemingly-endless trauma, evil. The emptiness of it all. I think I was gifted with perception, but turned that scope against an event horizon, and went mad. I honestly think I saw my own future madness, and that was what actually drove me insane.
Self-efficacy, the term used to describe our belief about what we are capable of doing in any given situation, is influenced by experience and the actions of others, and it is put to the test when we are caught in dangerous situations. (Bandura 1982). If we are able to master the situation of danger, to successfully run away or win the fight, or we are able to successfully recruit help, then the risk of long-term physical and psychological changes are lessened. But if we can do nothing to prevent ourselves or someone else from sustaining harm, we experience helplessness. Human beings deplore feeling helpless. We will do almost anything to avoid experiencing our own impotence. Children are especially prone to post-traumatic stress because they are helpless in most situations.
An opinion is a product of a subjective reality. Because most peoples' subjective realities center on a locus of comfort, their opinions tend to reflect whatever is in their best interests. As the billions of subjective realities don't all share the same locus, it stands to reason that the unique center of reality—objective truth—is both uncomfortable, and not necessarily in a person's best interests, at least in the short term.
Politics is the struggle between multiple definitions of reality. Only a subjective reality centered on the locus of objective truth—the truth of God—can be considered accurate. If humankind shared the same center, there would be no contention, and there would be no use for politics.
To say that atheism is simply disbelief in a god or gods gives no rationale for that disbelief. Granted, there are many reasons for disbelief, such as denial caused by traumatic events, lack of interest in spirituality, etc. ... however those who have a rationale will say that they are unwilling to believe in anything that can't be empirically proven. Another way of saying that is that the atheist believes that reality centers on a locus of human reason, rather than a locus of divine reason. My point is that if divine reason is the real truth, then human reason, which attempts to define truth in more and more precise ways, would continuously moves toward the former. The process of refining collective subjectivity inevitably leads toward objectivity, in whatever form it takes. Thus as the questioning life must inevitably lead us toward understanding, it's possible that it will lead the unfaithful to God.
Is it the truth as determined by every individual? The truth as determined by one religion? The truth as the general meeting point of all major religions? Whatever makes the most sense to you, I guess, keeping two important things in mind. That there must be some actual truth to reality, and that unless human beings have created reality themselves, there's no reason for reality to make sense to them.
If a personal subjectivity is centered around a locus of comfort (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual), then it will resist any force of gravity that tries to relocate it. This is why violence tends to happen across groups—since each group will have its own common center, exerting pull on all others. The agitation caused by this pull is violent in nature.
To erase violence, humanity must find a common locus. As it is impossible for billions of people to find a common personal locus, the locus must be the center of truth. This is the truth of God.
The plane on which subjective realities lie is objective reality itself. This plane could be described as one aspect of God’s existence. At the center of this plane is pure truth.
The purpose of the Messengers of God is to provide a locus of truth meant to attract subjective realities. The dispensation of each prophet is an adjustment of the same locus. The adjustment is made in order to make the locus as effective a center of gravity as possible. Each adjustment also brings this locus closer to the actual center of objective reality, to the reality of God. It thus leaves traces behind, which unfortunately remain populous, and humankind is left with multiple points of focus, rather than just one.
Mental illness is an inability to locate your own point of focus. Whether or not it lies near a general point of focus is irrelevant. An extraordinary person would undoubtedly have a unique point of focus (thereby finding it difficult to relate to anyone near a common one.) The important thing is to find your own center, because that gives you enough perspective on objective reality to render your own subjective reality clear. Clarity, being one of the most important things anyone can achieve, is thus dependent on seeing your life for exactly what it is. The longer one goes without being capable of getting proper perspective on one's own life, the harder one’s life becomes, since any decision made using a skewed perspective will be erroneous. In fact, a skewed perspective will have its own erroneous point of focus, and each time one tries to move toward it, one actually moves it by the amount of skew, and thus ends up following a wider and wider curve outward—not necessarily from the correct point of focus, just away from the original point of focus. The only way to stop this movement is to correct the skew on one's reality. This is the reason for psychiatry and psychology.
Once there is no skew to one’s reality, the task begins to find one's center. Only at the center of an un-skewed reality can objective reality become clear. If one’s brain chemistry makes it impossible to right the balance of one's reality, then one is always moving randomly away from the center. What one has to do is move toward the center faster than one moves away from it. Hence the typical chronic fatigue that usually accompanies mental illness.
The main task of the mentally ill is that of simply grasping reality. It’s much easier to do this when one’s point of focus is near everyone else's. The hundreds of points of focus around each normal individual act as points of reference, making it easy to find the center. Whether a normal person grasps reality is then only a matter of wanting to. Someone with a chemical imbalance, however, may want to grasp reality quite badly, but is incapable of doing so. They are constantly attempting to adjust the skew of their understanding, which leads to obsessive self-searching; non-stop observation, trial-and-error, and adjustment; self-absorption; inappropriate behavior; addiction—as well as depression, mania, anxiety, and the natural ways that the mind breaks down with overuse—Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, paranoia, delusion, hallucination, memory loss, and decrease in brain function. The symptoms vary with each person, but it’s a fact that the mind needs to rest a few times a day in order to function correctly, and if it can’t, will warp and malfunction.
Because of this complex and stressful brain activity, one’s emotions can become agitated, confused, or violent. The worse this becomes, the more difficult it is for others to be around one, without their emotions becoming similarly agitated, confused, or violent. The worse this becomes, the less people there are to interact with, reducing the points of reference even further, and intensifying the emotional pain. The pain, driven by need, looks for comfort, and gravitates, on its own, to a comfortable, though erroneous, point of focus. It thus becomes increasingly painful to be away from this locus, leading to conditions like agoraphobia, and introversion in general.
Mental illness, being physiological, at least in part, is as much a disability as blindness, deafness, or paralysis. In fact, beyond the virtue of it being a physical handicap, it becomes disabling because of the stress and pain of living through it. Unfortunately, because mental illness is mostly hidden, it is also the most misunderstood of handicaps. To make oneself understood, even (and especially) to oneself, one has to be able to describe one’s situation. This is nearly impossible, since one needs to have some clarity in order to know what one’s situation is in the first place, and a constantly wandering reality will only find clarity accidentally. Thus the mentally ill live without being understood, except by professionals. Since almost all family, friends and acquaintances are not professionals, the mentally ill are, by default, isolated from the rest of the world, by varying degrees. Not only is mental illness debilitating and extremely painful, but people who aren’t mentally ill tend not to believe that it is, that the sufferer is simply wrong-headed.
Even if one is able to articulate precisely how one’s life is, the only people who would be interested in knowing that are professionals. The mentally ill, even when they have the capability of explaining their reality, are confronted on every side by people who really don’t want to know. Thus the healing process—or the process of destruction—must happen in secret.
Since mental illness is a constitutional skew to reality—a thinking disease—the devastation of loneliness and ostracization systematically worsens it. Like progressive hearing loss, reasonable steps have to be taken to counteract the process. Instead of surgery and prosthetics, the sufferer of mental illness needs clarity. Clarity is achieved by righting the skew of one’s thinking, and that is achieved through finding points of reference. Finding points of reference is possible when the outside world is trying to provide them. Professionals do the best they can, but often they contend against the willful ignorance of the rest of society, which increases the suffering of the mentally ill, worsening—rather than healing. Truly one of the responsibilities of a conscientious citizenry is that of reaching out to those who suffer from mental illness.
The reason there is a center to human reality in the first place is because the general center of the network of everyone’s subjectivity exerts gravity on the subjective realities around it, bringing humankind into general agreement on basic aspects of the truth. Often there is more than one agreement, possibly two or three loci, or "points of focus".
The highest concentration of subjective realities is centered on that locus. In the same way that people tend to gravitate to major cities, the mass of subjective realities tends to gravitate to various loci as well. They’re usually split along cultural or national lines, though there are also splits along gender lines, racial lines, political lines, etc.—which create similar, though different "generally agreed-upon" realities.
It doesn’t follow necessarily that either objective truth, or the most desirable of realities, exists at those points of focus. The gravity that is exerted on reality is need. Need creates the most comfortable of realities, and there is no reason to believe that objective truth is comfortable; there is also no reason to believe that the most comfortable reality would be the most desirable one. Therefore, there is little reason to gravitate to a point of general agreement, unless by necessity.
If you think of the rules a religion imposes, they reflect the will of God. If God is real, yet religion false, then what rules does God really have? If God is loving, and He has rules, which are contrary to those held by the world religions, then wouldn’t He want to communicate them?
If there can only be one model that represents reality then the only possibilities are a reality with one model, or a reality with none. It seems quite obvious that reality has a natural law, so it can't be the latter. It has to be the former.
