Another Script From the Cosmic Play [not a script]
The greatest dogmas are those which insist they aren’t dogmas at all. The greatest dogmas are believed so entirely they can’t be stifled by facts or empirical evidence. The greatest dogmas are so deeply woven into the fabric of society, the dogma is entrusted with encapsulating the entirety of consensus reality.
Every little community across the U.S. had its own language, its own customs and rituals and rules and regulations, existential partial-truths, logic and reason, and its own eastern and western horizons, the limitations by which it defined itself. During the age of specialization, each community’s “experts” held their squared mile-and-a-half plot of land as an accurate geographic representation of the totality of existence.
She who occupied the Great Plains analyzed the soil and proclaimed to know Mother Earth. He who occupied the shoreline put a drop of ocean water on a slide, slid it under a microscope and proclaimed he knew the tides. She who dissected the woman’s heart and he who dissected the man’s brain proclaimed they knew the functionality of mind and emotion, body and soul. On it went like that throughout the states.
Wodan was the last wandering mystic of the Disinformation Age, the last seeker of Self from the age of specialization. Wodan was the last of the ancients who knew the nature of Self as transitory, and the last to know the incessant pilgrimage of Self-Discovery.
Guided by Sacagawea, Wodan the vagabond drove across the U.S. from East to West, imagining the plight of Lewis and Clark Corps. On the journey of Self-Discovery, each day was a new dimension of reality and each new terrain was its own set of hurdles, yet at each crossroads another community had planted roots and sprung up by its own perpetuating, non-transitory certainties.
Crossing the Mississippi, traversing the plains, the Rockies, and towards the Pacific, Wodan wondered what would’ve happened had Louis and Clark run back into the Mississippi. Certainly, they’d have known themselves to be lost, to’ve wandered backwards. The only signal to the seeker that he was moving in the wrong direction was familiar terrain, for if he were moving, each day would be entirely new, with new experience on new terrain. Yet, there at every crossroads, entire communities had sprung up of familiarity, certain they were moving, evolving and exploring new worlds despite their vigilant adherence to tradition and immobilizing paradigms.
Wodan experienced each community as its own plateau, incessantly stifled by its own dogma so deeply woven into its fabric as to be fully integrated into each plateau as knowledge. Each plateau functioned by repetition with its individualized paradigms being passed on generation to generation through a homogenized education system. In a transitory world full of wanderers, at every plateau there was temporary permanency. In a world where the only constant was change, each plateau’s population was dedicated to the principle and functionality of remaining exactly the same.
Each plateau made permanence of its uncertainties and definitions of its limitations. From each plateau, where the sun rose is where the world began and where the sun set is where the world ended. From the plateau in Nebraska, for example, their own savior, Jesus Christ could’ve driven into town, and if he drove in from the east, they’d insist he was from North Dakota, and if he drove in from the west, they’d insist he was from Idaho.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Final Discourse With A Shrink (Not A Script)
INT. PLATEAU — WHITE ROOM — DAY
Mid-sentence, Wodan begins speaking, “The thing about trying to inspire people to drop their definitions of themselves, to stop identifying themselves with their limitations is people are so attached to their dumb identities they often feel I’m attacking them. It’s always sensitive people who get offended, but sensitive people are the exact people I’m inspired to try to inspire.”
“Why did you bring me a rock, Wodan?” the man asked.
Wodan looked down at the huge rock he had set on the table. “It’s not for you. It’s for my script,” Wodan responded. “I needed a gun for the first act. It could be inconsequential. Most things are. You, too, should be inconsequential in my story. I’m trying to figure out why you’re not — why I’m still attached to convincing people to stop attaching themselves to their dumb identities. Why are all these inconsequential things so consequential to you, and why is it so consequential to me to get you to see how inconsequential they are? Do you realize in three separate correspondences you told me that werifesteria is your favorite word?”
The man responded, “It’s just a quick way to share with you who I am. I, too, am a wanderer.”
“You’re a wanderer who’s never wandered off this plateau. You also begin many sentences with, ‘as a homosexual man living with bipolarity…’ That’s not so much an expression of who you are but an identity. You’re defining yourself by your preferences and your limitations.”
“We’re a very progressive plateau,” the man said contentedly, “and I want people to feel they can relate with me - to let them know I also suffer with mental illness and adversity, and it’s taken many years and a lot of work to find equanimity through therapy, meditation and medication.”
Wodan stared blankly into the abyss. “When we first spoke, you asked me take a personality test. I received an 8 out of 9 personality types. Do you not see that you’re attempting to categorize people by your limitations? Basing anything on this number is the epitome of ignorance. I guarantee, if I took that same test last year, results would’ve been completely different. Next year, results would be completely different. A soil sample in one still space in time is not an accurate representation of earth. That’s the thing with astrology, too. Only idiots obsess over how to define themselves now. What kind of clothes do I wear to match my identity? What sign am I? How do I define my sexuality? What’s my gender orientation? Am I carnivorous or vegan or vegetarian or pescatarian? What are my likes and dislikes? How do I describe myself? Do you listen to your own mind as it goes through this incessant rigamarole?”
“Like mindfulness, you mean? Yes, I practice mindfulness every day,” said the man.
With his right hand tapping out S.O.S. on the rock in a 5/8 time signature, Wodan continued, “If you were practicing mindfulness every moment, none of what I’ve said would sound foreign to you. Apropos of nothing, defining yourself by who you have sex with isn’t very progressive, either. It’d be as irrelevant as your favorite word if it weren’t for the historic, systematic oppression of homosexuals. The fact that you don’t have to repress or conceal anything is worth celebrating, but it’s just another identity, a facade. It’s not who you are. Perhaps you’ve suffered shame in the oppression of neighboring plateaus, and now you identify yourself with the opposite of that oppression, but identifying with the opposite of something is still identifying with it.”
“You propose I hide who I am?”
“You are hiding who you are. You’re hiding behind a fortification of identity, likes and dislikes, categorizing and classifying every aspect of who you believe yourself to be without acknowledging you built these ramparts of identity around yourself to hide who you really are. You’re so deeply fortified, you’ve convinced yourself you are the fort, and for the vast majority of people you meet, perhaps the limitations of these descriptive aspects of personal identification are descriptive enough, but to me they’re red flags of inauthenticity. You like walks and rainbows, and you medicate your brain so as not to experience undesirable emotions, and with every correspondence, you’re attempting to build a slightly modified version of your own identity around me. But the fortification of identity is not who you are, and the fortification of identity you’re attempting to build around me is not who I Am.”
“You think I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I do. I’ve shared with you that I am a survivor, that I have overcome obstacles, and that we both share a diagnosis of bipolar dis-“
Wodan interrupted, “I only shared my adolescent misdiagnosis with you to juxtapose the fact that I have completely overcome all symptoms of bipolarity.”
“Right.”
“I shared my writings on the so-called ‘disorder’ with you in hopes you’d share this great potentiality with your patients. It seems instead, you’ve repeatedly implied that you, too, have completely overcome the ‘disorder’ using medication and therapy. A so-called ‘disorder’ which requires daily medication and weekly therapy hasn’t truly been overcome though, has it?”
“Over the years,” the man responded, “through many trials and tribulations, and by acknowledging and treating my dis-order, I have found order.”
“Have you, though?” Wodan asked.
“Have I what?”
“Have you actually found order? Or have you built a box of limitations around yourself on a plateau of people with like-minded attachments to an illusory mean, median and mode of ’normalcy’?”
“I don’t know, Wodan. I have found equanimity in this chaotic world, and I feel this is a success. When I began to acknowledge that my mental illness was causing me imbalance, I asked myself what is the opposite of imbalance? Balance. Equanimity. And through therapy, medication and meditation and mindfulness, I have found some equanimity.”
“The opposite of mental illness is not equanimity. Plainly put, spirituality is accepting and surrendering to the turbulent, ever-evolving life. Mental illness is fighting and resisting the turbulent, ever-evolving life.”
“I do practice acceptance and surrender, as well.”
“Medicating the brain is not surrendering to life,” Wodan said. “Intentionally blocking chemicals in the brain is actively resisting life. Inhibiting serotonin in the brain is perhaps the most severe and detrimental resistance to life, blocking the human system’s intuition, blocking the human system’s ability to respond, stuck in a reactive state. Actively resisting life in reaction to the fear of sadness or the fear of anxiety or mania or any so-called disorderly state of being - this is the opposite of surrender. And anxiety, by its very nature, IS fear - living in fear of the future. We now live in the age of humans fearing fear itself.”
“FDR,” the man said.
Wodan laughed. “So why are we doing this to ourselves? Because we believe in the el-usive, all-usive, ill-usory paradigm that life’s goal is happiness? That the body, mind, emotion and energy’s natural reaction to suffering is bad and wrong, that sadness is something to be avoided at all costs? And why? So we can get back to the mundane tasks of maintaining these plateaus of normalcy?”
“For me,” the man said, “I have found some equanimity and yes, normalcy, relative to say twenty years ago. Many of my patients would probably speak similarly, struggling through the past, and day by day, through many trials and tribulations, finding some stability in this life.”
Wodan laughed. “Security, stability and comfort are entirely illusory. None such things exist. You’re one of countless people moving in circles around countless plateaus who’ve fooled yourselves into believing you’re progressing, many of whom believe they’re fully evolved, full of wisdom -enlightened, even. You’ve become attached to the delusions of security, stability and comfort. You’ve named them equanimity, and you’re convinced you’ve reached the pinnacle of human achievement, perhaps even realized the goal of life. You’ve successfully managed to temporarily avoid the turbulent mountain passes and hidden valleys in lieu of a flat stump, and now you’re mechanistically training new generations to believe the same gobbledygook, to reprogram the brain not to feel intense emotions, insisting that by temporarily lessoning the suffering, you are progressing — insisting that psychological and spiritual growth are a peaceful transition into ‘order’ from ‘disorder’. Big Pharma loves your propaganda campaigns. Your plateau has successfully de-stigmatized ‘mental health,’ introducing billions to new chemicals, new existential paradigms of how the human system ought to function. You mix in New Age spirituality techniques like mindfulness and meditation to serve up a perfect cocktail of spiritual bypass, spiritual materialism and blockages from head to toe.”
The man nodded his head, acknowledged, contemplated, and said, “I think we have more in common than you realize. I’m not a pill-pusher. I’m not a fan of Big Pharma. Medications are a means to an end. I also understand you don’t like being labelled, being categorized, being diagnosed, but for many of us, this is the goal. We want normalcy.”
“You don’t want normalcy. You want an end to suffering, and there’s no medication or therapy which will give that to anyone. Don’t you see every human on every plateau believes he and she’s reached the pinnacle of his desires? They all believe they’ve reached the greatest heights, and not a single one has ventured into the mountains for fear of getting lost in the valleys. Nine to five jobs; Netflix all evening; sports on the weekends; junk food; sex; entertainment, comfort, stability, security - that’s it, right? You evolved from a single cell to a fish to a tortoise to a pig to an ape and finally you’re a man. Are you finished evolving? You think lying on the sofa watching Netflix while eating potato chips is the pinnacle of human evolution?”
“No, but I don’t know what is the pinnacle of human evolution. Do you?”
“Yes. I do. It’s the only thing I know, actually. I only know one thing, and that’s it.”
“OK, what is it then, Wodan?”
“Life is suffering, and there is a way out.”
“OK, what’s the way out, Wodan?"
“To relinquish all attachments and surrender completely to what is. That’s one way of attempting to fit the ineffable into words. The Way doesn’t fit into words, and it always sounds paradoxical in language, because language is limited by the bounds of logic, and The Way is beyond logic.”
“Humor me. Won’t you try to fit it into words?”
“Do you know, my whole life, people have accused me of pessimism and cynicism. They’ve accused me of being a divergent, dissenting, quarrelsome contrarian who’d argue with a brick wall. The reason for this is, it’s impossible to say ‘What Is’ in words. The only way to say ‘What Is,’ is to juxtapose it to what isn’t. I paint black on the canvas of the illusory backdrop humans have created, blacking out all the untruths, leaving only what is. It’s impossible to say what God is. It’s impossible to say what enlightenment is. It’s impossible to say what anything truly is. The only way to express it is via deduction. The painting isn’t black at all. To those who don’t see what’s left after the rest is blacked out, the entire canvas seems empty, painted by a sorrowful cynic, entirely black. The black is just a backdrop. The true subject of every work of art which has ever made its way through me, including this one, is the ineffable goal of life, the one Truth.”
“That’s beautiful imagery, Wodan.”
“Beauty and humor are the only means within my power to inspire an experiential phenomenon within people. If you’re not experiencing what I’m singing or saying, they’re still just words and sounds.”
“Why do you think bipolar disorder and mental illness are such common themes for you?” The man asked.
“Suffering. People with so-called ‘mental illness’ have begun to acknowledge their own suffering. Anyone who seeks out treatment is ready to evolve. They’ve made the most difficult first step, but they’re being herded like sheep towards the cliff of ‘normal,’ and their evolution is being frozen in time by chemicals and therapies which don’t acknowledge the role of suffering. Dampening suffering, propagandizing the de-stigmatization of the lie of ‘mental illness’ to shepherd swaths of humans towards this illusive ‘norm’ has wreaked havoc on The West and is making its way insidiously across the world.”
“But don’t you believe in free will, Wodan? Can’t you just acknowledge that some people desire this illusive ‘norm’?”
“Desire Is the Universe. Very few people willfully fuck up their own lives in order to reveal their one true desire. Most people haven’t figured out their one true desire yet. The New Age ‘spiritual’ idiots are all about the law of attraction. We can use our desires to get what we desire, but it just creates new attachments. As long as people believe they know what they desire, it’ll always be the same stupid shit: money, houses, cars, power, the opposite sex, the same sex - and so that’s all they get. Those who’ve mastered the art of manifestation use this immense power with such reckless abandon, we end up in a world like this one, full of shit. But when we realize what we’ve actually desired all along is ineffable, life gets really interesting. The crazy thing about this realization that we all desire the same thing is we can only figure it out through immense suffering.”
“Are you a Buddhist, Wodan?”
“No — or yes. I’m either a member of all religions or none. Either way is fine. If I accidentally quote Buddha, I’m trying to relay the experience I’m already having. If I say something you think somebody else already said, I’m using his words in order to convey an experience I’m already having. But I’m not talking about Buddha. I’m talking to you about my experience to inspire contemplation in your experience. When I talk about my past, my career failures, my poverty, my traumas, tragedies, illnesses and addictions, I’m trying to highlight the patterns in my life which led me to this revelation of my own true desire - in an attempt to inspire you and your patients to have your own revelations of your own true desire.”
“I understand that. I understand you’re trying to inspire me to abandon my years of training and decades of experience counseling my patients.”
“C’est la vie,” Wodan said. “You chose a field of study which is doomed for failure. One hallucinogenic trip outperforms decades of therapy, does your entire job in one day, costs barely anything, and the medicine grows out of the fucking ground.”
“Is this why you’re so anti-psychology, Wodan? You want people to trip on drugs?”
Sarcastically Wodan responded, “Yes, I’m advocating everyone become a drug addict. Drugs, my ass. It’s one sure-fire way of realizing there is another way. A brief encounter with the ineffable can do more than you or I can do in this dumb little life, and mushrooms are one way of having that brief encounter. Humans refuse to renounce their dumb little identities without first realizing they’re dumb little identities.”
“OK, I get that.”
“You don’t, though. And this is why I haven’t spoken to anyone in years. I exhaust myself trying to tear down other people’s self-built walls of identity and belief, and they walk away believing I said something they already know. Every conversation I have, one party walks away feeling fully understood, and I walk away knowing I was completely misunderstood. In every conversation, I become a sounding board for her belief system and his identity. I exhaust myself trying to connect with the authentic part of the human, the only real thing in the universe, and instead of letting their own walls down, people from every plateau across the U.S. build new walls around me, recreating an identity for me in their image. I’ve torn down every aspect of my identity and yet the first thing each plateau attempts to do is build an identity around me by the lengths and widths and depths of their own limitations.”
Wodan stared into the abyss. “You said to me, ‘You sound a lot like a Gen-X-er. How old were you when Challenger exploded?’ Everything you say is an attempt to categorize and classify my Being into identity. You’re not even here. Your profession of putting people in boxes has so repressed the authentic Self within you that you aren’t here at all. It’s so engrained in you, you have no awareness of the fact that every expression of you is from a place of identification, and your analysis of every individual in your presence is an extended expression of your limitations. ‘You’re the type of person who…’ fill in the blank. ‘I’m the type of person who…’ fill in the blank. You’re not even aware that you’re not in the moment when you’re talking about how to be in the moment. You’re not even aware that you sit in judgement as you speak of no judgement. Everything is judgement in a taxonomic breakdown of identity. Your plateau has rewarded you for your hierarchical classification ‘skills’, and so you believe it to be a strength, but there’s only one of us here. I’m arguing with a textbook and then getting frustrated when all that comes back is analytic data.”
“We live in a world of limitations, Wodan.”
“You live in a world of limitations. You can’t know what you don’t half understand. Thoreau said something like that. It’s true. You don’t half understand what I’m saying.”
“Ah, but I do understand you, Wodan. I’ve been on this road many years.”
“The road you’re on is a roundabout on a plateau.”
“Well it certainly doesn’t feel like a roundabout.”
“These are empty identities we slip in and out of, as transient as the human condition, as thin as the skin. I attempted to share with you my experience with kundalini. You remember what you said?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘My kundalini rose very slowly,’ meaning you actually believed you’d already experienced kundalini. You went online and read a list of symptoms and decided you must’ve also experienced kundalini. You had and have no idea what kundalini is, and yet repeatedly you feel certain enough about it to tell me yours awakened very slowly. Kundalini doesn’t rise slowly. The word kundalini implies where the energy is located, and once awakened from that location, there is nothing subtle nor slow about its awakening. But because there’s no words to describe the ineffable, every person who’s ever felt cold or hot or tingling in the spine says they understand it. Here I am, two years in, juggling an atom bomb, looking for solace in camaraderie, and here I Am again, arguing with a brick wall. I actually thought I could offer you something. But why would anyone trust a vagabond drifter on the nature of reality, on the one true desire, on life itself. Wodan the Wanderer doesn’t even have a plateau to live on! He’s divergent. He couldn’t possibly know anything.”
“I think you know a lot, and I’m fascinated by your story, Wodan.”
“Ha! Fascinating? My whole life, people think I’m trying to entertain them. You called my writings ‘divergent,’ didn’t you?” Wodan asked.
“Perhaps. Divergent isn’t necessarily bad. Just different,” said the man.
Wodan told a story. “In 2021, the whole year I lived in national forests. Up in the mountains of Colorado, I drew a comic of a wild field mouse walking into the sunset over the numinous Rocky Mountain backdrop. In the window of a house, a pet hamster is rolling on her hamster wheel, stuck in a cage, unable to see the sunset or the mountains. The pet hamster says to the wild mouse, ‘You don’t even have a wheel or a cage or a water bottle? You poor thing.’ The wild mouse owns nothing and knows nothing but the wild majesty of eternity. The pet hamster thinks she has all there is to have and knows all there is to know.”
“Am I the hamster, Wodan?”
Without acknowledging the question, Wodan continued, “The difference between me and the wild mouse is, for some reason I’m still stuck trying to convince the hamster to break out of her cage. In the comic, the mouse doesn’t say a word, just keeps moving along. Of the ten people I’ve spoken to the past 2 years, there are two camps: believers and disbelievers. Believers and disbelievers are exactly the same, because you can’t believe one thing without disbelieving another thing. They’re exactly the same. There is a third option no one seems to get. We can become believers, disbelievers or seekers. All anyone can do with an experience they haven’t had is, they can believe it by trying to cram it into their memories of past experiences, they can disbelieve it by saying, ‘this doesn’t fit into my past experience,’ or they can become inspired to seek it within themselves. The so-called ‘spiritual’ people say, ‘I know exactly what that’s like, because I’m spiritual,’ but with every word and every action they affirm that they have no idea what I’m attempting to convey. The so-called ‘scientific,’ rationalistic ones believe it’s a trick of the brain. There’s only one person I’ve actually enjoyed speaking with the past 2 years. He’s non-spiritual, pragmatic, and simply accepting. You know what he said the first time I spoke with him about my kundalini experiences? He said, ‘That sounds really difficult. I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I hope you make the most of it,’ and then we spoke for 2 more hours about all sorts of things. Do you see how that’s different?”
“Did I not say something like that?” the man asked.
“Acceptance without pretense, without conditions, without identity. Just acceptance. Some people don’t feel the need to fit a person inside their own memory, to muster up a sort of pseudo-sympathy of shared experience. The human experience is already a shared experience if you’d stop dumbing it down. All of you plateau people match words with your memories and say, ‘I know all about that.’ My music, my life’s obsession which I threw every waking hour into from my earliest memories through adulthood, you compared to your brief, failed acting career. What could be more patronizing than that? Why do people confuse this with compassion? Saying, ‘I’ve been there too, and I know what it’s like’ isn’t compassion. All the while, I was just trying to penetrate your fortified identity to get to the authentic Self you have so cleverly hidden away. It was exhausting, and I haven’t spoken to a single person since.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Fortune and misfortune are indiscernible. If I told you I knew exactly what it was like to be gay, because I was a strange adolescent, would you feel my compassion? Or would you feel completely alienated?”
“I’m sorry, Wodan. I didn’t mean to alienate you.”
“I Am alien in your plateau, so why not alienate me? I’ll be leaving soon, anyways. On your plateau and every other plateau, pretending to know exactly what someone else is feeling, defining experience with your own limited identity — this is the ‘norm’. This pseudo-sympathy is always associated with compassion, but it’s not compassion. Compassion is acceptance, not understanding. No one understands anything, certainly not the human mind. Ask a neuroscientist what she knows about the human mind. But psychologists pretend to have the mind all mapped out. As soon as you start believing you understand something, you’re lying. Acceptance is the nature of reality. Acceptance is compassion. Accept the journey. Accept each other. Accept the director of the movie and accept your role as the actor, and the more we accept, the more we become directors of the movie. But don’t pretend to understand. There’s nothing more offensive, more off-putting, more alienating, than pretending to understand someone. If your profession had any efficacy, you wouldn’t have long-term patients ever, would you?”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“That’s the only way to authentically look at it. If psychiatry and psychology worked, the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry would topple over. When you diagnose people with chronic ‘illnesses’ and chronic ‘disorders,’ they’re trapped. They’re trapped.“
“Well, I do accept you, Wodan. On the topic of compassion, may I read you something from one of my favorite Buddhist authors?”
Wodan sat and listened as the man rehearsed and rehashed the same regurgitated New Age platitudes of the placated plateaus, illusory alliterations which alluded to some illustrious half-hearted half-truth about compassion.
Then the man said, “You should read this book. I think you’ll get a lot out of it. I’ll send you a link.”
“I first read the teachings of Gautama Buddha as a child,” Wodan said. “But why would I read the books of Buddhists? New Age Buddhists - New Age spirituality - It’s not wrong. It’s more like if I were speaking of particle physics and you brought out a grade school geometry book. It’s nice. I appreciate the effort. I don’t doubt the usefulness of basic geometry, and indeed, I could use a refresher from time to time. It can’t hurt to be reminded of the symmetry of our world and the beauty and simplicity of shapes. There is great truth there, hidden in plain sight, but-”
The man interrupted, “You believe yourself to be above all this simpleton spirituality?”
“I don’t believe anything. I never have believed in anything. I never will. And I certainly don’t place myself above or below anything. I don’t look up or down at anything or to anyone. It’s just that, I’ve read and heard enough words by Buddhists and Christians. I want to experience the word of Buddhas and Christs, not Buddhists and Christians.”
“Buddhas and Christs?” The man became contemplative.
Wodan continued, “These Buddhists and Christians have written about their journeys without ever reaching their destinations. They’re maps to nowhere. Rather, they’re maps from plateau to plateau.”
“I see. And where is the destination?”
“To become a Buddha, to become Christ. Everything on earth is reaching for this ineffable reality - the trees, the animals, even the fungi - and man is stuck in the middle defining himself by his limitations. Every man, every woman is seeking the same thing, usually in all the wrong places - whether it be in power or sex or drugs or fame or money or even extreme sports, all the while people are building identities around themselves to make sense of it. One of those identities is, ‘I’m a spiritual person.’ But that’s not truth. It’s just another identity.”
“I’ll tell you what I believe,” the man replied. “I believe that suffering deepens our compassion. Maybe that’s why I so often mention my past struggles. I’ve learned and grown by confronting all of these issues.”
“Good. Suffering leads to a lot of things. Paying lip service to compassion and living it are two very different things. It appears to me that you’ve dug yourself a deep trench on this plateau and are defining everything from that trench. You’re a sensitive man who’s fortified all aspects of identity in order to protect himself from the harsh nature of the true evolutionary journey of life. People on these plateaus, they find some temporary stability, security and comfort, and they write books about how they’ve found it. They think they’ve found spirituality or equanimity or whatever, but actually the opposite is true. They’ve completely stopped moving. Their evolution is stagnant, and they’ve become inert. When each day is the same as the last, they’ve formed extreme attachments to the delusion of stability, security and comfort.”
“OK, so what if you’re right? What if I like the delusion of stability, security and comfort?”
“When we become still and the world moves faster, we are evolving. When we become still to escape the world which moves fast around us, we are stagnant. Escaping hardship is not spirituality. Accepting hardship is.”
“You think?”
“I know. It’s the only thing I know, and it still doesn’t fit into words. You know what is the most frustrating thing about this plateau?”
“What?”
“The idea that someone outside of us can tell us how to fix what’s going on inside of us.”
“And yet, therapy works. It helps.”
“Helps relative to what, though? If the paradigm of external ‘help’ didn’t exist, we’d all be forced into Self-Discovery, and Self-Discovery is the only way to actually find our Self, our spirituality, our evolutionary path.”
“Many of us, myself included, find external help to be greatly beneficial to the journey of Self-Discovery.”
“Again, beneficial relative to what? Think about what’s really happening. Using the limitations of one’s own linguistic skills, the patient tells the doctor what’s wrong with him or her and then trusts the doctor to tell the patient what’s wrong with him or her? At the end of my script, the patient finds out he was right all along, about everything, and every doctor he’s ever seen was entirely wrong - about everything! On this subject, I am willfully projecting. In this dialogue, you, the man, have represented over 70 different ‘mental health’ professionals I was forced to see as an adolescent.”
“You personified them all in me?” the man asked.
“Yeah, sorry. There’s probably some offensive shit in here. I needed to figure out why it kept replaying in my head. Why were these few correspondences I had with a fan of my music so pertinent? I know you didn’t say all of this - or even much of it. So, why then was it replaying on a loop?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I needed to hash it out. In my last email, I tried one final time to dutifully convey the entirety of my kundalini experience, and I failed miserably. You completely misunderstood me, and you were entirely convinced you fully understood me. That’s the repeating theme of this life. That’s the last thing I am to overcome. Midway through the phone conversation I became aware of this. I would completely humiliate myself just to get to the authentic part of someone, to get them to drop the facade. But no one realizes they’re doing it! They can’t help it. You can’t help it. Or, maybe you can. Either way, it’s not my job to change you but to accept you.”
“And your budding ego bobs in.”
“Yes. It does. My ego says, but how can you accept that they think they know what you know they don’t know?! The answer is, the same way I accept everything else. I just accept it. I accept the fact that all over the western world, doctors, people with authority, are telling young men and women they have to follow institutional procedures, take medications, and enter into the ‘mental health’ taxonomy, and these poor souls are listening and willfully being led to slaughter. It’s the same story with modern scientist’s insistence upon nihilistic materialism. The reason it’s so important to me is, I was fooled by them. All of you had me fooled for 30 years, and I have to come to terms with it. The scientists had me convinced that life itself was an accident, and that there is no metaphysical reality. They had me convinced this little material world was all there is. The psychologists had me convinced that most people are normal and I Am diseased, disordered, flawed. I was fooled, and I was angry, and now I must come to terms with it.”
The man responded, “And you have to accept that people like me are doing our absolute best to help not harm our patients. You have to understand that people like me are always going to believe we understand people. We enter into these institutions with the expectations of becoming authorities on human mind and emotion, and we’re taught that this is the best way to do it. And people like me are always going to believe that people like you are too blunt, too divergent, too haphazard to be authorities on the subject of human body, mind, emotion and energy.”
Wodan threw the rock through the window. “I do sincerely appreciate the final correspondence. I needed to try to share my actual experience with one more person one last time. Kundalini will be entirely misunderstood by all whom haven’t experienced it, and anyone whom considers himself remotely ‘spiritual’ will always believe he’s experienced all there is to experience. And now I need to let go of the idea of external ‘help’ or guidance, and I need to let go of any anger or frustration over being misunderstood, misidentified, humiliated, patronized, belittled or boxed in by psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, friends, family, fans and every single person I’ve ever fucking known, and I need to accept that people will remain on their plateaus until they’re kicked off their plateaus, and for any and all, I will always offer any and all I have to give to those fortunate or unfortunate ones if ever the time should come that I should be the giver or the guide.”
Wodan stepped one foot out of the smashed glass window as the man stared with his jaw dropped open. “In any case, I forgive you - all of you. I forgive you all for convincing my entire family I was insane. I forgive you for the years of misdiagnoses, for all the misery and mayhem. And I forgive all the people on all the plateaus who’re scared shitless of the mountains and the valleys. I don’t blame you. The wild winds of eternity can be chaotic and scary. Compassion means accepting all of you exactly as you are. Compassion means, what looks to me like a shit-show in your idiotic world, somehow in the matrix, the infinite web of cosmos, somehow it’s supposed to be this way. If it weren’t this way, why is it this way? Acceptance means, we’re all wrong in the perfect way, and telling anyone they’re wrong in the wrong way makes me wrong in the wrong way. So… I accept the world the way it is. I accept each person on each plateau exactly as they are. I accept my station in life. I accept the fact that I have no authority and no influence over anyone but myself. I accept that this recurring issue of being entirely misunderstood isn’t actually an issue. I will spend the rest of my life in service to the world in which I live, accepting everyone and everything as they are and as it is without ever attempting to change them or to be understood by them. As difficult as it is to accept, I accept. I accept. I accept.”
Wodan jumped out the window, off the plateau, into the infinite abyss.