2017

There is something very horrible gnawing away inside of me. 

It is a cancer in my mind. It speaks to me every day, and whispers of death. 

I am, after all, only a mortal; caught in the coils of a mundane fate. 

I once felt that I could be at peace in life. I felt that I could surround myself with love, family, wealth, security, and a brilliant future. 

I have all the things I thought I wanted, but none of it is real. I am entirely, completely, and unequivocally alone. I am naked, barren, tired, and afraid. 

Now, death seems my only chance at peace. Death to the lie that is my life.

It was not always so. 

To An Old Friend

It has been a long time since I thought of you. I wept for you today when I learned of your recent loss. There were many nights when I was younger and still in love that I was tormented with such pain. There were many nights that I fought through that pain to turn it into a prayer, the strongest prayers I have ever cried, begging Him to never let you feel anything like what I felt. Now He has finally betrayed the last of my prayers. That is how I feel at least. I know you would disagree. I know you would admonish me not to think that way. And I would smile and tell you that is precisely why you are such a beautiful soul. I am truly sorry that such a beautiful soul must experience such sorrow.

Father

My father, Allen Gale Ebling, died of a massive heart attack at approximately 4:30 AM on August 4th, 2012. He was 57 years old. My 13-year-old sister had secretly left the house, presumably to do drugs with her friends, and he, in perfect character, had gone out looking for her at the park down the road from our house.

My father was a very simple man, from my perspective; although I was surprised to hear from some of those closest to him that they considered him a genius. Regrettably, I never had the time to develop an intimate relationship with him, as I spent many years away from home.

What I do know of my father is that I respected him far more than anyone else I have ever known. While he had his flaws, he knew how to live by his beliefs in a manner that was always selfless and caring. He was a provider and a protector, and everything I ever saw him do was motivated by love and care.

The Temptations

As a young child I remember listening, with an admittedly limited comprehension but with sufficient understanding to feel a combination of respect and intrigue, to my family members as they discussed the many exploits of my grandpa, who had retired, bought himself a mobile home, and begun travelling the country apparently solely to visit as many spas as possible, which was a really just a mechanism for hooking up with as many older women as possible. I remember he married three or four times, I think, since he turned sixty.

The interesting thing to me as a child, and still today, is that my family members always seemed to exercise this special moral code in their consideration of his actions. Whereas were it anyone else they would have judged, condemned, and generally mentioned not a few religious platitudes--for whatever reason what my grandpa did was somehow admirable in their sight. He was, "making the best of his time," "filling his last days with happiness"; and so on and so forth.

For my family members, the satisfaction of their own desires was a matter of severe religious taboo; being part of a conservative religious culture as they were. As a child I was strictly indoctrinated in the religious decree of abstinence in all things, the mandate against desire. Yet apparently, given the above example, I knew even as a young child that there was a limit, even to this taboo. The onset of death, this was a spectre even more terrifying to them than the scorn of their society; and so they recognized that my grandpa had passed out of the domain within which they dwelt, into a special domain lacking their rules.

A friend of mine said to me the other day, "I don't appreciate temptation." (She was not referring to me, just to be clear.) I thought about that statement for a while. Temptation is only desire masked by the veil of social taboo. Of course, her statement was a negative, meaning "I take offense at temptation," not merely a neutrality. I however would say "I appreciate desire in all its forms," and it seems that as I grow older, I even hold a special appreciation for temptation, for it is desire that battles against our limitations, that entices us to throw aside our fears and embrace the joys of life, while we yet have time to do so.

So, I suppose I would say to those who read this, perhaps you should embrace the temptations around you, rather than fleeing them. There may be a day when you wish you had.

An Eclipse of Thought

It has been a while since I posted anything here. I have been preoccupied with the mundane lately. Work, household chores, daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, social interaction, even, to some extent, personal relationships, all can be mundane, although even the mundane can possess meaning. However, I believe the true meaning of the mundane is found not by an identification with it, as some would find themselves: defined nearly entirely by such things; but rather, a disassociation from it to the point that it can be perceived clearly as something separate from the self, this as the great philosophers, spiritual figures, and disciples of meditation have found themselves throughout history: defined not, but rather, defining. This is a very useful means of judging the measure of psychological development of another; if they are but an expression of that which they must do, then they are psychologically immature, but if whatever they do is transformed by their touch into an expression of that which they are, then they are psychologically mature. This is, of course, a very general statement, and it must be noted that there are both exceptions and different states that manifest similarly. An example of the former would be a high-functioning lunatic, whose actions can often seem at first observation to coincide with a mature psyche, when in fact the very opposite is regularly the case. An example of the latter would be an individual caught in the grips of an inspiration originated from an archetype of the collective unconscious, for the defining nature of his actions is not due to his own psychological maturity, but rather merely a result of a momentary loss of self to something that is beyond his comprehension.

All this to say that I have lately been preoccupied not merely with doing the mundane, but also with contemplating it, and contemplating that which I personally consider the antithesis of it: "an eclipse of thought."

On the Psychology of "Love"

"As a rule the motives [the young man] acts from are largely unconscious. [...] The greater the area of unconsciousness, the less is marriage a matter of free choice, as is shown subjectively in the fatal compulsion one feels so acutely when one is in love. [...] His Eros is passive like a child's; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. [...] The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment. [...] [E]very beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. [...] [This] projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. [...] The effect of anima [...] on the ego [...] is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling of rightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations. Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods [...]. Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized. Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority. The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship."

-Excerpts from "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" and "Aion: Phenomenology of the Self" by Carl Jung (edited to limit Jung's discussion to the male phenomenology, i.e. to remove discussion of female phenomenology and the animus)

Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell

"The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life--which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of nirvāna. Briefly, nirvāna means "the Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion." As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree [...] the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kāma-Māra, literally "Desire-Hostility," or "Love and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvāna.

Belief and Resolve

Belief is but an immature form of resolve, and he that believes cannot resolve but can only be resolved by that which is dictated to him. In this sense, belief is an act of escapism and a process of succumbing, for he that believes absolves himself of the responsibility necessary to attain resolve, specifically, the responsibility of engaging in the process of individuation as manifested symbolically in the monomyth.

Excerpt from "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell

"Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. [...] It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as-yet-unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved."

Excerpt from "The Golden Bough" by Sir James G. Frazer

"Hence Odin was called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal, in which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:

'I know that I hung on the windy tree
For nine whole nights,
Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
Myself to myself.'"