Been There, Done That?

Been there, done that? The catch phrase that expresses global angst—the ennui of having experienced so much—the spiritual anesthetization that follows from living too much ordinary life—too many blue Monday’s, meals, TV shows, unfulfilled expectations, unreachable dreams, personal failures.

Been there, done that is a slothful habit, a perspective—it is not a reality. It is a sign that you have given up—stopped looking and questioning. It is a sign of resigned defeat, an acceptance of your current self-perception as an inexorable reality.

Do you remember the moment in your youth when you looked up at the stars in wonder and marveled at the mystery of it all? The uncertainty of what kind of creature you were—crawling between heaven and earth. You were an undefined entity. You felt the excitement of a future in which you would discover who or what you were—where you fit in.

Experience is mistaken for understanding. As we age we have experienced so much and familiarity replaces the wonder and questioning of not knowing. You think you know what you are. The body’s perceptual mechanisms habituate to stimulus input—we adapt and a threshold is established. Only new stimulus values can disrupt that threshold—more intensity.

Remember when your life was intense. Hormones raging; the chemistry of procreation perpetually driving emotional highs and lows. An uncertain future of tentative aspirations and dreams. Optimism, naiveté, hope, fear—a cauldron of internal energies and expectations.

Then the small defeats, the accommodations—the adjustments to your strengths and weaknesses—your limitations. The lies, the betrayals and hypocrisies that are part of “being realistic.” The pathetic mendacities and rationalizations that obscure the betrayal of one’s honor; small maneuvers to obscure the truth from ourselves.

Traitor…traitor…who did you betray? You lied to those who loved you; you let them down by prostituting yourself before the godhead of—small deals to aggrandize your petty material pursuits. Now you sit and stare at the wall and wait for the inevitable—you almost welcome a release from the thing you think you are—the failures, the deceptions—the unrequited ambitions?

You have not been there and done that, you have been somewhere and done something—but there are many more things to be and places to go. You have to overcome the stabilizing, normalizing, adaptive mechanisms with which evolution has so well equipped us.

Life is a word that describes the magical behavior of inert matter in space, over time. Matter tends to organize itself, combine, acquire complementary surroundings, move forward, increase complexity and reorganize at a higher level of functionality. We don’t know how it started. We don’t know where the organizing template originates.

You say God did it. Welcome to the end of your life. Now you know the answer to everything. Go read the bible again and sit back and wait to die because you have all the answers. Harsh? Perhaps. How many deeply committed Christians do you know who are uncertain about who we are, where we came from and where we are going? Three questions that open the door of existential wonder.

We crawling, excreting, ingesting, thinking creature imprisoned on a star within a universe within an unknown. The poet’s lyricisms, enigmatic and often undecipherable express images from a horizon beyond which we cannot see. Sometimes in an altered state we see beyond the limitations of our evolutionary restrictions and catch a glimpse of something we can not articulate, a new horizon.

Failures, compromises, betrayals, mistakes—the boredom of the wall, the ceiling, the door—you are the stuff that stars are made of; you come from beyond a place that is beyond a place that we can not imagine. When there was a time before the beginning of the time that preceded the time we now know, that which conceived you was being conceived by something else.

Been there, done that? I don’t think so.

When logic and proportion,
Have fallen softly dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards,
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”
Remember what the Dormouse said.
Feed your head, Feed your head!

The Future

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Ayn Rand

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,–often the surfeit
of our own behavior,–we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.

Travis Bickle, The Taxi Driver

The Myth of Psychology

Do you have any faith in psychiatrists and psychologists? Psychiatrists are trained during medical school; their explanatory model is Freudian psychodynamics. Psychologists (the licensed ones) are trained in graduate school for about 4 years. There are many schools of Psychology, each created by a dominant individual whose explanatory model or models were particularly compelling.

I was in therapy with a few psychiatrists when I was in my early 20s—off and on. If I was to give you a painstaking retrospective on my childhood, you would understand the “why” of my therapy. You might also wonder why I am not incarcerated in a nuthouse. I also worked at a few psychiatric hospitals and worked with every level of crazy person. From the mildly neurotic (like myself) to the psychotic (confuse reality with fantasy), I worked with them all.

I have known a great many psychiatrists and more psychologists than I have the time to name. The psychiatrists are MDs and quite quirky, and eccentric. They are strange. If you meet one at a party, you tend to slide off to the restroom quickly. Psychologists are similar, but often more strange and less intelligent.

The psychoanalysts are the most intriguing with their deeply symbolic perspective on human cognition. Freudian psychology is much more interesting than other schools of psychology because it has lots of drama and sex; kind of like a good romance novel.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are usually individually loyal to a school of thought, and there are many. The different theories are replete with perspectives that contradict the key positions of other schools; it is a riot of complexity and ambiguity.

The unanointed in our society—the average Joe with a Bus Ed degree—is held captive by the self-proclaimed authorities of human behavior. This carnival of “knowers” holds the high ground, kind of like the strawman in the Wizard of Oz with his honorary degree.

The average person does not understand Abnormal Psychology and the community of psychiatrists and psychologists are not doing much to educate the public. They spend most of their time defending their theoretical turf. That is why when someone that works with you or me is seriously deranged nobody notices. They attribute weird verbal or physical behavior to eccentricity or a personality variation.

Genetics, hormones, biochemical anomalies, and developmental experiences contribute to the final product—you and I. There is little that can be done short of pills and pre-frontal lobotomies. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists do perform one solid function; in most case they can listen to the human being that pays them and respond appropriately; they can be a rent-a-friend. They do not judge (unless they are bad therapists) or advise, but attempt to facilitate the individual’s recalibration to reality.

Border’s Bookstore has hundreds of self-help books and the self-help TV shows run day and night and our society is inundated with nervous, anxious, alienated, enraged, depressed and lonely people. So, you ask, what is the point of this—what am I trying to say? I wish I knew.

The Mystery of Being

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Being alive is easily taken for granted. If I stop and think intensely about the state of “being alive,” it is a wondrous thing. In an endless, dark and forbidding universe of destructive energies, the magic of life evolves from the unfathomable analogues of matter.

Even more amazing, the mindless continuation of self-organization perpetuated over the millenniums creates entities such as ourselves who in turn create complex entities—unimaginable, given the context of our origin.

Our creation is beyond imagination, yet we habituate to our state and lapse into a trance of benign indifference to the sanctity of being alive. I have to admit it is difficult to savor and fully enjoy the process of living. If you focus on the instant, the momentary sensations of being and the magic of consciousness, you are soon distracted. It is impossible to stay within the moment—to revel in the joy of being.

So you forget all that and take out the trash or pay a bill or worry about something—you are easily sidetracked into the mundane issues of keeping up your body and its primal needs—part of the debt we pay to our evolution.

Each passing second is another precious moment lost to us—bringing us closer to

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns

The more I concentrate on my living state, the more dreamlike it seems. In a physical world where the governing principles are scaled beyond comprehension, where parallel universes are rationally considered, how can we know what we are?

We should be aware of, think often of, the treasure that is ours so briefly. John Keats who died at age 26 focused his brilliant sensitivities on his immanent demise in an Ode that summarizes—for me—the transience of our lives and the tragedy of our passing. It captures the emotions of inestimable loss.

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and lang’rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise –
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,

In the Beginning

This blog will not interest anyone who is involved in a professional religion of any domination. You already have the answers to some burning questions that trouble those of us who are not fortunate enough to have been born with the supernatural gene.

There was an article in Time’s recent edition that covered another profound discovery about the Big Bang. We can now see even further into the past (a few billion more light years) and so on and so forth. I have no doubt that these new findings are of interest to theoretical physicists and cosmologists, but for the rest of us—confusion.

They never come out with a headline like, “Scientists Discover What Existed Before Our Universe.” Or, “Research Breakthrough: The Creator of God Revealed.” Of course the Enquirer never disappoints. There are frequent inclusions like, “Man Confesses to Being God—It Really Took 8 Days He Admits.”

Suppose we go back a million trillion years ago; what was happening then? Of course we (the supernaturally disadvantaged) will never know. It seems there were no ancient Greeks or Romans with a secular persuasion who could make up some plausible story. I guess the Christians had access to all the creative writing instructors. Ultimately no answer—just speculation, albeit informed speculation. What did God do before he created the universe? It must have been boring without a few billion people and trillions of bugs to manage.

The religionist’s beliefs provide them with the moral precepts needed to keep them from fornicating with their neighbors’ wives, stealing from the convenience store, lying, cheating and such. The rest of us are not so fortunate. Without the 10 Commandments, we founder around vulnerable to spontaneous episodes of violent antisocial behavior and fornication.

Interestingly, whenever they interview a tornado victim whose house has just been flattened, the emotional homeowner says that God did it; they don’t know why. The lower socioeconomic strata of our nation seem to think that God has some private agenda and intermittently needs to destroy a perfectly good double wide. Thankfully his interests have changed. The bubonic plague killed 1/3 of the world’s population back in the 16 the century, about 24 million people. If that was his hobby now, 2 1/2 billion people would be missing Christmas.

Some poor misguided souls believe that self-awareness allows us to be conscious of our actions and their consequences which in turn inform a sense of right and wrong. Hence, we have a genetically endowed moral capability—not a mandate. Professional religionists are pretty much controlled by the mandates from the Mount and there is little room for rationalizations and breaking the rules. I don’t think its fair that some of us have to use personal discipline and will power to overcome the urge to kill and fornicate, while a privileged group has a playbook to work from; “nope—sorry, no murder for me today. Says right here in the Bible, killing is against the rules.”

The “Shroomers” (for the uninformed, these are the degenerates that are constantly seeking euphoria from mushrooms they dig out of cow manure) report God sightings regularly, but they explain them in such a way that those of us who are unfortunately non-euphoric, cannot understand. They also experience parallel dimensions, adjacent universes and transcendent states of resplendent clarity.

I think the reason the religionists are against substance euphoria and visionary products is that they are afraid they will see God on one of these transcendent experiences and they don’t want that confrontation. Its one thing to dress up and sing hymns, its another to have the one who controls your eternal rest tell you to stop smoking, eating bacon, and having fantasies about cheerleaders.

I wish I could find a drug that allowed me to see into the warp and woof of our universe—or the next winning lottery number. Most people would say that they don’t worry about what existed before the universe, or what happens to them after they die; they are more concerned about what is going to happen to them if they lose their health insurance.

If you live in Georgia, your concerns with your origins and your ultimate demise yield to another preoccupation summarized by the question—“how bout them dogs?” One is better served being obsessed with the answer to that question than wasting one’s time considering who made God and who made the entity who made that entity.