My Darkest Moments

We all have our dark moments, and as Artuad says; “Someone who doesn’t know depression, who has never felt the soul encroached upon the body, invaded by its weakness, must go beneath the surface, one must look at the underside; one must lose the ability to move, or hope or believe, in order to observe at all.”

For me, I feel so alone in these thoughts so often. I have many gifts and a wildly overactive brain that gets me about 4-5 hours of sleep a night. With that, I often grow weary of “dumbing myself down” to allow me to relate to particular people who, no matter how hard I try, never feed me the way I need to be fed. I have been given many gifts, these gifts of the mind, yet of what use are they to me when they can bring me such pain? This self-constructed prison often tortures my every conscious moment; in the mornings, I have to arise the second I wake to my consciousness, to prevent the ensuing torture that my brain thrusts upon me mercilessly. The thoughts themselves are less relevant than the emotions they stir; they are bent on filling me only with anxiety over imaginary foes, such as failed dreams, time passing so quickly, fears of the future, and anything else it can manage to throw at me.

When the months turn cold, this prison grows exponentially. In the sunshine, I am free to roam around on foot, on my bike, or with my top down, on the beach, in the forest, or wherever I can connect with the lush beauty that Mother Nature shares with me. But in the cold, I shiver and shake inside these walls, doing my best to while away the months until the sun grows warm once again.

I have built a world here that is entrenched with things I don’t want to let go of; material possessions that help me to create my art and enjoy my world, such as my paint, canvases, my musical instruments, my scuba gear for diving, and my flight gear for flying. My business is here, and it creates the illusion of comfort and freedom, yet I am tied to it like I’ve been tied to nothing else. And this year, this cold has left me more trepid than usual. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I escaped it two years ago; I ran off to this island to find that which I was missing, yet found only a tropical paradise, the place of my dreams, yet absent of even a shred of solace.

We all think we have so much time, that growing old is such a distant occurrence somewhere in a distant future, maybe something that we will find a way to outsmart, or to trick, or to meditate away, but no one has ever escaped. These frames slow down, they wrinkle, they wither away and die, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

If one speaks of these or writes about them, most of your audience is lost. You are to dark, or obsessed with death, or too intense to deal with, so you are relegated to the dark corners of our thoughts, to brood silently, and alone. Every day we’re all equally marching towards death at an alarming rate, yet no on ever speaks about it. No one ever talks about this one universal experience we all share; the one that binds us all together in this delicious dance, in these fragile frames, for these brief moments.

People’s fear is what keeps them from experiencing it, but for me, it’s what drives me to live.

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2 Comments

  • Keith Cleversley
    November 2, 2011 at 7:45 pm 

    Andrew,

    A sincere thanks for sharing your experience and I look forward to seeing how your website/experiment unfolds! If you want to get an even clearer picture of where my personal experiment is headed, have a look at “The Gnosis of Myth” section elsewhere on this website.

    Sarva Shanti,
    Keith

  • Andrew G
    November 2, 2011 at 5:01 pm 

    Cheers,

    I stumbled upon this website just yesterday, and have delighted in the insight and research you’ve so readily provided for those interested and yearning for something that is quite difficult to speak of.

    I too have glimpsed feelings of being intensely near a divine power–one which I suppose religion makes a point to identify and study. While simply “being(!)” within nature and falling asleep in the middle of the woods this past summer, I was overjoyed at the feelings of residing within the Circle of Life, the energy field, and reducing the elevated feelings of superiority over nature that man attempts to erroneously place upon himself. I did not understand these feelings, but the great satisfaction that came with these experiences was something I pursued. One of the mistakes of man was to try to separate itself from that which was its source.

    As you often share, attempting to speak with others of this subject often leaves me feeling disassociated and lonely. I become dissatisfied with living within a culture that values worldly desires based on materialism and living for tomorrow. I’ve discovered that one of the ingredients for true happiness is to be completely absorbed in the moment.

    I wish to pursue that which is constantly yearning for my attention, but to do so would necessitate ostracizing oneself from society and that which has provided a reasonable amount (illusion?) of solace and satisfaction. Yet your musings of the elation that comes with living a life based on truth is a reminder of just how satisfying life is capable of being. I cannot accept my current life, yet moving in a fruitful direction is difficult to do.

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