In-between

a note between silences

In today’s age i don’t really blame anyone for holding grudges, bearing resentment or bitterness, or being completely distrustful. Even though these emotions can be damaging, they are also natural side effects of oppression, betrayal, abandonment, instability, poverty, injury and abuse.

Most/many people want a kind of support from others that they can’t reciprocate and/or can’t even give themselves and this sets up a kind of vampiric society of infantilized and risky people.

For me, the only respite is my collection of deathpractices, because i don’t want to hold a grudge but i can’t dwell on the bitterness of my history with other people. All sides of that equation are damaging. So, what is an alternative?

Speaking from experience it is a kind of playful and strange sort of haunting, or a haunted ideological frame. This means that i am a ghost who believes i am human, and that awareness is key in mitigating ghostly damage.

Whether or not i “really believe this” is not the point. It is a state of mind, a frame, a theatrical prompt from which i can choose more interesting and helpful actions, which may include waiting, letting go of ideas and expectations, even things like desire, love, hate, hope, trust, etc.

All of these relational effects can be seen as just summoned weather, which can dissipate as soon as one ceases to create them. You don’t have to create their opposite either.

Part of what nondual animism has taught me is that there is always more than my perception perceives, so, even if i can’t perceive something, i can allow for the “x” variable to exist within a vast space of potential “things”, which also includes a “non-thing”, or “things i can’t imagine”.

It’s this expansiveness which relieves some ghostly residues and hungers, even if the next moment i am attacked by biochemical demons or astrological misfortunes, etc.

There is so much focus today on achieving and maintaining situations that we deem to be good and worthwhile that we can’t seem to accept that nature and life might not distribute these golden opportunities evenly or personally.

Reality is impersonal! And therein lies true freedom but that freedom requires the ability to “turn off” the personalized self which personalizes pain and trauma.

No one is owed anything, not even a fucking hug, certainly not “being understood” or even “loved”. When we can sink into the truth of truth in such a way, many delusions drop dead from lack of sustenance.

At first this entire shift in position may seem “alien” or “robotic” or “unhuman” until you focus more on sensations and perceptions rather than ideas and narratives.

Moving through space or just breathing can be a great pleasure, but it is a kind of pleasure divorced from any sense of future or past. Totally divorced from referencing time in this limited and ultimately delusional way. In this, even pain or fear is somehow not what we think it is, life and death, not what we think it is. We could disappear or be erased with no sense of loss or grief whatsoever, the same way we forget dreams upon waking.

I have scoured the earth for the clues to healing and have found that in the absence of good fortune, this is the only viable pathway.

None of this means you will find good allies, lovers or support. I can’t sugarcoat the reality that for many, there is no pot of gold at the end of a rainbow or at the end of a terrible journey. Sometimes the only reprieve is the reprieve we give ourselves in the thin moment between knife and throat.

Perhaps this is why we cannot love others, because we have all forgotten what true love actually is.