This might be my last essay for a while, though I will continue posting occasional poetry. After much thought about the matter, I’ve decided that routine blogging no longer serves as the best use of my time and effort. I’ll explain shortly.
First, let me state what’s been clear to me for some time: I’ve already written about most of what I’ve found important in recovering from troubled moods and moving toward a deeply informed life. In brief, the vital principles are: accepting that emotions come and go, recognizing that they have no power to destroy unless acted upon, and acknowledging that there is certain beauty even in pain. Then there are the life-experience corollaries: even trauma can teach, even terrible loss can lead to remarkable gain, and it is always possible to view events from different and healthier perspectives. The rest is experiential: meditate, accept, reframe, and you will find the way to peace.
Why not continue to write about these truths? Mainly because doing so is not currently helping me grow. I find that expository writing strengthens the verbal, rational part of my mind, and that is no longer what I desire. Instead, I’m hoping to become less articulate, less analytical, less relentlessly thought-full. I want to embrace sensation and felt life, and move away from ideas and description. Not that intellectual work hasn’t served me, or pleased me, or helped me. But right now it is time to live more and think less. That means writing less, or at least less prose.
Lately I’ve come up with an idea that humans are bound by the same duality seen in subatomic particles. I see in our lives the same phenomenon that allows photons, electrons, and other fundamental units to appear as interwoven waves under some conditions and as discrete particles under others. In parallel with the physical principle of wave-particle duality I call our disparate manifestation Self-self duality.
The idea of a larger Self versus a smaller self within us all is an old one, which can be succinctly stated. In my view, the Self, with the capital ‘S,’ is the soul with its manifold tendrils eternally connected with all life and all creation. It is wavelike, distributed, and feels interwoven with the universe. On the other hand self, with the small ‘s,’ is the ego, the personal, the human isolated in the modern and anti-mystical world. It is particulate, discrete, and feels separate from creation. Every person has both aspects. The Self, is expansive, loving, interacting, and generous. The self, is contracting, wary, isolating, and self-interested. Even when the self communicates with others, it does so with an eye toward its own wellbeing. Even when the Self stands alone, it does so with a heart open to the wide, amazing cosmos.
As is the case with wave-particle duality, the way we set-up our environment and activities determines which aspect of the Self-self duality we most observe.
Writing essays feeds my smaller self. Even when the concepts are large and loving, the words come out from the verbal mind, which by nature adheres to the egoic view. This isn’t wrong or evil, but it’s not where I want to direct my energies right now.
I am more tired and limited than twenty years ago, when perhaps I could have successfully pursued a career as a writer and a second career as a healer. Today, I need to choose. The healing is more fulfilling because it brings me in direct relation with the living, breathing biology of human life. By that connection, my own Self is enlarged and healed. The loving, caring connection that I feel toward those who come for treatment heals me as much as them. It is a process mutual growth that brings me toward greater realization of Self in the world.
Writing, while rewarding, brings less contact and stimulates more contraction. It is enjoyable and leads me to new and important truths, but my heart is calling out for more than words. It wants wellness in the largest sense of the term. That means living deeply within my organic matrix of limbs, fingers, organs, senses, and so on. It means placing this vital being and in the vulnerable position of reaching out to another with the intent to heal. This place of tender grace just can’t be reached via a computer terminal. Not by me, not now.
If Self-self duality means that one aspect or the other will dominate depending on circumstances, then we need to choose. If we encourage articulate, verbal communication, we automatically strengthen the self, no matter how laudable the words spoken or written. If on the other hand, we communicate through embodied, caring presence, we strengthen the Self, with its large heart and open exchange. Perhaps a great spiritual master could keep in touch with Self while working intensely in verbal mode, but I cannot. So until my growth progresses to the next level, I need to set up my world to encourage the presence of expansive, intimate relation rather than absorbed, verbal communication.
There are nearly 250 posts on this site, and they chronicle much of my progress. They will remain available until the time comes when I feel ready for another burst of writing like I just completed. I thank everyone who has followed my posts, and I wish you all the best as you find your Self in this difficult, terrible, wonderful, and affectionate world.
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