Outside the Matrix

I started this blog late last year because I was searching for an answer to a very basic question: What is the truth?  Where it's taken me I don't think I could have ever fully predicted, and over the months it has evolved to become a reflection of me and how I see the world.  I think that's good.  When I started blogging, I was deeply afraid to share myself period, let alone broadcast it like this.  I haven't really promoted it, because I've spent most of the past year trying to hone my craft, to the point where reflecting myself in this way became second nature.  I think in a way, I've succeeded, and this post is proof positive.  All of this began with a few Facebook statuses, and over the years since I started that, all this has completely taken on a life of its own.  Everything I've posted here thus far has been completely true, but what I haven't shown is how it's affected all of me.  I think I really stand right now on the threshold between what I'd been working towards and something else, and so I want this post to do two things.  First, I want to fill in all the details of what I haven't shown over the past few months, and hopefully put this all into context.  Second, I want to use this post as a bridge to newer and bigger things I have planned for the blog in the future.  So, with that in mind, here goes.

I had, for most of my life, had a real problem with articulation.  Anyone knows me knows how verbal I am, so this may come as a surprise.  I've written something like eleven novel manuscripts in my life, but really they were all about only one thing.  Every work, whether it was The Academy, or any of my other long-running ideas and series (such as Emma's story, or AK's) were all attempts at articulating the same idea, one that has been with me for as long as I can remember.  They are all about freedom.

The word freedom is bandied about a lot these days, and in the past on this blog I've used the concept of the simulated world in the movie The Matrix as a metaphor for my own particular interpretation of the word.  Searching for it, I believe, is one of the most basic efforts of all life.  By now I hope that my struggles to control and manage my mental illness have been made clear what this means to me, at least on a functional level.  Just like in the movie, freedom to me is the awareness that everything around me--everything I feel, everything I think and do and see and experience is in some way an illusion, and that my craving and my clinging for that which is neither permanent nor in reality what I imagine it to be.  It's not even a state of mind: that would imply that I had somewhere to go, existentially, in order to get it.  The only path to freedom in that sense I ever found was acceptance--acceptance of the way things are right now, without trying to change anything.  Life is suffering, and then we get sick and die in the end for our efforts.  But acceptance doesn't have to and shouldn't be an ending.  That's resignation, and resignation is garbage.  Acceptance--true acceptance--is a beginning.

Two Thursdays ago, I walked out to my secret beach, at an undisclosed location in the greater Portsmouth area, determined that I was going to accept something about myself that I had been striving towards for the better part of a year.  I had a problem with validation.  There were many reasons, some of which I'll eventually touch on on this blog, and some of which are largely irrelevant at this point.  As I've come to understand, the reason why something is the way it is in my head is less important than how it works, at least as far as undoing it is concerned.  I couldn't be happy on my own.  I'm hard on myself--even still now too hard--and I have unrealistic expectations of what I can do and how quickly I can get it done.  I used to imagine an audience--mercurial, always just out of reach of the light--laughing at me, talking about me like I was a giant fraud, rejecting me.  At certain points in my life that audience may have been real, but not anymore.  I think that audience turned out to be as much a reflection in the mirror as anything else.  I feel extremely self-conscious about these things, which is why in the real heat of these moments I always try to make them public--on Twitter, which is linked to my Facebook account, which is a real and powerful tool to seek validation.  It was that self-consciousness that was the problem, and by publicly admitting it, I faced the fear and it no longer held any power over me.  It was a realization as profound as the experience was grueling.  Because of it, I have now come to the following conclusion, which holds larger implications than just my own personal betterment.

We think our problems are external to us.  If only we were rich.  If only we had that new pair of designer jeans.  If only we went on vacation.  If only our boss weren't so mean.  If only other people weren't so rude.  If only we could not be hurt.  If only our loved ones would change.  We crave.  And what we have doesn't last.  Relationships end.  Friends move away.  Elation turns right back to normalcy and habit again.  We cling.  We can't see it for what it is, because we're right down there in the cycle of it all and we don't know anything else.  But the problem is not our bosses or our loved ones, or liberals or conservatives to put this in a political context.  The problem is our craving and our clinging.  It's not the people we're fighting, it's the fighting itself.  This is what I've learned.  Now that I can see it for what it is, I feel to some extent freed from it.  Not totally, mind you.  But closer than I have in a long time.  My imaginary audience went away.  I stopped craving validation because I stopped needing it.  As the Third Noble Truth of Buddhism says: eliminate the craving, eliminate the suffering.  I didn't truly understand it until that night on the beach, but I think I do now.

All of the people I've written about thus far are real, and all have helped me reach this conclusion in their own way.  This is the end of one chapter in my life and the beginning of a new one, and thus the end of one phase of this story and a new beginning.  What I'm going to get into next is both more difficult and more complicated, and I have every intention of giving every nuance and detail its fair dues.  Writing this has been tremendously helpful, and I hope it will continue to do so.  If I understand freedom now, at least what it means to me, all the better.  If I don't--well, at least I know a good way of seeking it out.

The Illusion of Cool

Of course, no one is as cool as Snoopy.

First and foremost, apologies for the long wait before this post.  When I began this arc last week, I had a very specific idea in mind with what I wanted to do with it.  It has turned into something very different.  I think I would do best to introduce this post by talking a little bit about why I have this blog.  I was at a meeting of other local writers, and the subject of memoirs came up between me, a friend, and a new woman who had only been to one or two of these gatherings.  The woman wanted to write a memoir about surviving emotional abuse.  She was very focused on the marketability of the book, as if her suffering was a product to be packaged and sold--a commodity like any other.  It made me realize, in the heat of the conversation, that that isn't what this blog means to me at all.  I may appreciate feedback and take comfort in the knowledge that people care what I have to say, but ultimately that isn't why I started blogging about my life.  I blog about my life for myself, to try and put my demons to rest.  What others may think about it is at best secondary, and worst irrelevant.  This is to be key as I go about what was supposed to be a follow-up post.

Talking about Suzie as I did last week was actually very difficult, and it made me realize that talking about Emily the Rock Star was going to be even more difficult.  Both young women were something of a riddle to me-- a Zen koan that seemed to hold the key towards overcoming the latest obstacle in my path.  I'm more convinced than ever this is true, and after several days of intensive meditation on the beach, I feel both like I've put Suzie to rest, and I feel ready to talk a little bit about Emily.

Emily was cool.   Emily was the coolest teenager who ever lived.  Emily is the embodiment of hip: a rock star, someone with their finger on the pulse of the here and now, who knows how to find whatever's happening and be a part of it.  I knew her in high school, and like Suzie, I found myself irresistibly attracted to her.  Like Suzie, that attraction was rejected, and the escalating fallout actually led to me being kicked out of the private school Emily and I both attended.  Emily was everything I was not: confident, self-assured, secure, and most importantly of all, she wore vinyl pants.  I very badly wanted to wear vinyl pants in high school (even today I own two pairs): they were one of the most distilled expressions of who I was in clothing form.  That time period was a time of immense struggling with my identity for me, particularly with my parents over how I wanted to look.  I wanted to dye my hair, I wanted to grow my hair long, I wanted to wear shock rock clothes, makeup, be someone totally unrecognizable.  But my parents wouldn't allow it, I was heavy from the medication I was on, and my image of myself was completely distorted from how it actually was.  (I do regret never wearing black metal corpse paint in public before I grew my beard, but I suppose as far as regrets go, that is a relatively minor one).  Emily was, in that respect, a representation of all I wanted to be but couldn't.  She also professed to be a lesbian, which of course only compounded my fascination and attraction.  It was all I could do just to keep it together day to day back then.  Of course things went south quickly.

Interestingly, however, and unlike Suzie, Emily and I reconnected a year or two ago via Facebook.  Imagine my surprise when we friended each other that not only were there no hard feelings for what happened between us, there was total forgiveness (and in fact, she claims, she had completely forgotten about it).  Talk about history being a matter of perspective.  Except now the relationship was different.  I was in my 20s, independent, and had begun to piece together my own identity.  I was, in some strange way, as cool as her, and she regarded me as such.  I cannot tell you how surreal an experience it was to suddenly have validation from the very object of cool that had previously rejected me.  But something was still wrong.  It was more than that.  Something about me needed her validation.  Now I'd had it once.  I needed it more.  It was as if nothing had changed.

This leads me to another one of the paradoxes of writing this blog.  Emily and I are still friends.  I have a great deal of respect for her, but in order for me to continue and explain the solution to her koan, I have to in some way talk about her flaws.  I thought long and hard about how I wanted to do this, because she is both a very kind, loving, intelligent person, and someone whose opinions I still value.  So perhaps rather than necessarily talk about her, it would be best for me to talk about my reactions to her.  After all, this is a post about how I overcame my need for external validation (if you hadn't guessed it already).  I can't very well put her down to bring myself up.  So let me instead talk a little bit about myself, and let me show you how she reacted.

One of the ways in which I seek validation the most is through sharing my music.  I have seldom had someone in my life who shared my musical tastes, and that made me feel very insecure about it.  I did this with a lot of people, but given that Emily herself is a bass player in a rock band, she especially felt like an authority on it.  But one of the things that frustrated me about that whole process with her is that she oddly bluntly rejected my musical inclinations.  I eventually came to understand that that really boiled down to a difference of opinion in vocal styles.  But for someone who takes things to heart, opinions like that are often misunderstood for objective truth.  I was looking for her to praise my prog rock along some sort of objective scale of "goodness," whatever that means.  What I got instead was pretty much all you'll ever get when you compare subjective art forms, which was her opinion.  The two are very different things.  She was always judgmental in an odd way, and it wasn't until I captured the dynamic in action that I began to get a hint of how it worked, and how my perspective was wrong.

I tend to make a natural assumption that there's always two levels to conversation.  The first is the surface, which is the literal content of the topic and discussion.  Bobby Eckstein, my brilliant counseling professor at UNH likes to call the other, deeper part "process."  Process is a lot like the part of the iceberg that's underneath the water: the meaning, the underlying explanation; substance.  By assuming that there is Process to everything I talk about to everyone, I had unwittingly been seeing and reacting to something that wasn't there.  Two clues from Emily led me to figure it out.

Emily occasionally blogs through Facebook's notes system, and one particular one caught my eye. She was complaining about the neighborhood in Philadelphia in which lives, how it hadn't gentrified yet, how she had to travel a long distance to be at anything "happening."  I don't know what in particular about it seemed so off to me.  It only made sense if you assumed she was thinking literally--like her words themselves were the actual meaning, and nothing more.  This is, I believe, the essence of her "coolness."  I'll explain.  A few days later, I had another conversation with her, in which I said something (what exactly I forget), that essentially had two different meanings depending on whether you were listening for surface or process.  I had meant it as the latter, but she misinterpreted it as the former.  A few more minutes of conversation and it became abundantly clear that there was not even an awareness of the process content of that line.  Though it took me a little while, herein lay the answer to the riddle.

There's one of two ways to look at this.  Which of those Emily actually is I don't really know, and it's kind of irrelevant to my point.  "Cool" in the sense that I'm referring to, is a surface feature.  One can obsessively try to find "cool" and seek endless validation for it, and one can even be quite successful at obtaining it (*cough*hipsters*cough*).  But there is another option, and in my opinion it's the better one.  One can simply disregard the need for surface-level validation.  Both techniques produce a superficially similar result, but in reality the two are worlds apart.  One makes you look confident.  The other makes you actually confident.  Once I'd brought myself to that point, it was a relatively straightforward decision: instead of doing what I think people want me to do in order to feel validated, why don't I do things that I like and validate myself instead?

My my, what a deceptively simple proposition.

When I realized that, late one night on the beach, deep in meditation, something incredible happened.  The craving ceased.  I had spent two years trying to resolve a conflict about myself.  The truth is, there was no conflict.  Believing there was a conflict was what created the conflict, and it necessitated taking it this far in order to see it.  That to me, ultimately, is Emily's greatest gift to me.  Then things started to come together.  Big things.  We're all trapped in a prison of our own design.  All we have to do to escape is walk right out the door.

Just like that, release.

Now I understand.  The rest is relatively straightforward.  I really hope others can read this and understand what I mean, because I think the meaning I've found here from this is more essential than all the others.  We all seek emotional satisfaction, but it's the craving itself that's the problem, not what we imagine satisfying our emotions will solve.  So there you have it.  Hopefully you can take away something from this.  I will remember this as one of the greatest things I've ever done.

Is That Porn In Your Congress? That's So Hot

It's time we were frank about porn.  When I get down to it, pornography has a lot to do with Mike, America, and everything I've talked about over the past week and a half.  I am an avid defender of porn.  The pornography industry single-handedly blazed the trail for us to watch home videos and surf the web, it's one of the only things standing between us and the trampling of our first amendment rights, and it made fetishism okay in society at large.  But what is porn, really?  Sexually explicit photographs and video?  Or is it something more?  This herein is an important caveat I have to make when I talk about porn.  Because there is far more to porn than just Bianca Beauchamp in latex or Ron Jeremy doing it to a bass solo.  Still reading this?  Haven't run away screaming?  Good.  This is the story of a very interesting realization.

I am obsessed with fetishism.  I don't mean this necessarily that I'm a big fetishist--like most men, I do have fetishes, but to think of it solely in a sexual context is to miss the big picture.  As strange as it sounds, whenever I read the news, especially about politics, what I see is fetish porn.

I think it would help for me to define pornography before I continue, and this is a trickier thing to do than you might think.  There is no real legal definition, just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it."  It is indeed a very blurry line.  To me, however, porn has always been about the glorification of something for its own sake. This is a pretty broad definition, and it manages to encompass really any idea you can think of, not just sex.  Under this definition, something like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ could qualify, or really any of the movies he produced, such as The Patriot, Braveheart, or Apocalypto.  In fact, this may be a useful example, because when I read Mike's self-published book, I was instantly reminded of a Mel Gibson movie.  I draw heavily here from a chapter in Max Blumenthal's Republican Gommorah (one of the very few examples of quality and informative partisan non-fiction), which details the rise and fall for the Christian Conservative movement, along with the rise of the Tea Party.  The general thesis of the book is that the dysfunction of conservative Christian politicians reflects a personal dysfunction of the Christian Right in general, especially as it regards to personal repression, denialism, and unwitting hypocrisy and self-contradiction.  Like with any partisan book, it's important to take its more political statements with a grain of salt and focus on the reporting, but a large section on the Evangelical Men's Movement of the 2000s, and in particular the works of Mel Gibson and Ted Haggard struck a chord with me, which directly influences my post here.  The important takeaway is that both offered a particularly rigid and self-contradictary definition of masculinity, one that glorified self-annihilation, violence, and dominance for its own sake, and in the process unwittingly glorified male homosexuality.  Anybody who has seen any of these Mel Gibson movies should have a fair idea of what Mr. Blumenthal and I mean.

The key point of the key point, then, is glorification for its own sake.  Particularly that last part: for its own sake.  This is what I think of when I think of Mike, and when I think of conservatives and a good deal of the issues currently being bandied about in Congress and in the news media.  Conservative Christians are very obviously fixated on the opposition to homosexuality, abortion, evolution, and science in general.  I've spoken with a number of Evangelicals both old and young about this.  It's almost as if voting a certain way has superceded Christ.  But think about that for a second.  It actually seems kind of odd, doesn't it?  In the whole wide world of Christendom, with such a rich body of history, tradition, theology, practice, and even emotion, why those very oddly specific issues?  Or take the fiscal conservative fixation on marginal tax rates.  By any definition it's a relatively narrow issue, and part of a much larger picture.  Climate change denialism, too.  And if you add them up, the pieces don't really fit together all that well.  In the Christian case, the emphasis on the traditional family takes us back to the cultural values of a papered-over and imaginary version of the 1950s, whereas the fiscal position fits very well with someone interested in short-term profits and making a quick buck.  But again, that seems very narrowly specific--unnecessarily so.  More importantly, each belief becomes self-reinforcing for its own sake, and largely to the exclusion of anything else.  By my definition, that would seem to be a fetish.  More than that, it's a fetishistic obsession.

Before you make any prejudgments, however, I shoulds say that I am no stranger to fetishistic obsession.  I have gotten lost in the details of both my own sexuality before, not to mention the details of many other things, like politics, anger, even my own religion.  It's interesting to see how much of that rigid, dysfunctional male ideal Mike embodied, despite not being Christian.  Scientists now say that cognitive dissonance isn't real--that would imply that the human mind is integrated in the first place.  I don't think one needs to eliminate the concept just because the mind is compartmentalized.  In fact, that compartmentalization may in fact lead to the dysfunction.  It's sort of like the character Dr. Strangelove from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name.  His hand has a mind of its own, and doesn't always do what he (his brain) wants.  We may be made up of modules, but those modules interact with the outside world as one body and one mind.  If anything, that makes the suffering of misinformation greater, not less.  Mike truly could not cope with the world in which he lived, and it created in him a specific combination of fetishistic fixations.

To conclude my point, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does come with a downside.  The inability to distinguish between your fetish (be it sexual, political, religious, or otherwise) and your beliefs can leave you very vulnerable to misinformation and cause you to draw disastrously wrong conclusions.  If you're fitting your observations to your beliefs and not vice-versa, you're going to miss the truth.  This is a real problem, and not one with a ready solution.  Thanks to the internet, you can have whatever you believe validated with the click of a mouse, no matter how extreme.  We surround ourselves with people who think and act exactly like we do and agree with everything that we say, and make no effort to challenge ourselves and our ideas with outsiders, all while complaining viciously about vaguely personal forces that oppose us, even though we've probably never encountered one of those in person before.  But this way--the pornographic way--is easier, and so we'll choose it every time.  It sucks, but we haven't developed the mechanism to discriminate just yet, let alone teach it to our children.  However, as bad as things are now, I have no doubt that we'll get there.  I can already see the beginnings of it.  We can all do our part by simply stopping to think about what it is we're consuming, what it means to us, and how it fits in the big picture.  It's not hard to do, it just doesn't come naturally to most people.  But we can do it.  I have faith.  We just need a little practice.

Label Me

If there was one thing Mike loved to do, it was label things.  Even before his descent into paranoid quasi-madness, he was always quick to identify the good guys and the bad guys, and everybody was either one or the other.  I haven't met a man or woman alive who didn't in some way use labels to identify themselves: introvert, extrovert, feeler, thinker, progressive, conservative, goth, punk, jock, prep, vegan, anarchist, Christian, lesbian...the list goes on.  In the concluding chapter of his rather apocalyptic book of cultural and political commentary Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant laments the fact that we have all these props at our disposal with which to construct our identity as limiters upon them.  I don't know if that's true or not, but it's certain that if there are advantages conferred by them, there are also unintended consequences.  This post is an attempt to in some way explain the way these labels work, for better or worse.

I should start by talking a little bit about myself.  I have never dealt well with labels.  This is not me proclaiming myself a unique snowflake; being unique is unimportant to me.  Nor is this post in any way an attempt to claim any moral superiority.  I am the way I am because I am the product of my experiences.  That confers neither superiority nor inferiority.  It simply is what it is.  I have, however, struggled with this, mostly in my relationship to other people.  It is true that in the past 100 years, our society has grown exponentially more complex, and the amount of information available to us today is so much greater than to someone 100 years ago that I doubt an adult from that era could even make sense of our world as it is now.  Joe Bageant speaks of a time before all this as some sort of utopian ideal, when we were free to be whoever we want, but I don't know if that's really accurate.  Looking historically, if anything, the lack of access to these identifier props seems to have been a limiting factor, not a helpful one.  What were my options in 1910s New Hampshire?  Not many.  But today when I walk down the street with my hair down in a t-shirt and jeans, I am more or less identified for what I am (though of course a quick visual observation will miss the nuances), rather than some sort of deviant.  Every Christian I know certainly draws a lot of security from that label: at least as much as from their faith itself.  There is nothing wrong or illegitimate about it.  In fact, I think one could even make the argument that it's necessary.  Bombarded as we are with advertising, news, and entertainment, how could we even make sense of what we perceive without in some way labeling ourselves?  We couldn't.  No, labels themselves aren't the problem.  But there is a definite downside, and this is really the heart of the matter.

Mike is not alone in his dichotomous thinking.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to name even a single friend or acquaintance who doesn't in some way engage in this.  My Buddhist religion teaches that this dichotomy is an illusion -- a form of ignorance that prevents me from becoming enlightened.  But that simple statement belies just how difficult it is to break free from that mode of thought.  So let's examine that way of thinking a little bit closer and see just where the problem lies.

Whenever I talk philosophy, or even really politics, one particular dichotomy always seems to come up: thoughts versus feelings.  Time and again I've been told that someone is a feeler and not a thinker, as if that somehow made them any different from me or any other human.  I've heard many times that feeling things is better than thinking them.  Jon Stewart likes to lament this when talking with scientists and other skeptics on The Daily Show.  It does indeed seem to be a difficlut conundrum.  But how true is it really: that feeling things is better than thinking them, or that there is even necessarily a difference between the two?

I think it's no secret that I feel things very strongly.  My capacity to feel emotions is every bit as great as my struggles with them, and if that were the end of it, I wouldn't be writing this post.  Emotions by themselves are largely useless without an ability to understand them.  After all, if you can't explain why you feel a certain way, what hope do you have of controlling your life?  Which is not to say that most people do this--they don't.  I certainly was beholden to my feelings for most of my life, cripplingly so.  The way out was to see them for what they really were--in all their subtlety, nuance, and complexity, and think about them.  We believe that thinking and feeling are two diametrically opposed philosophies.  In fact, one cannot exist without the other.  It's like chemistry: certain combinations produce certain reactions and results.  Thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin.  Trusting one to the exclusion of the other is not only dangerous, it's an outright recipe for disaster.  And that is part of what makes politics and religion so maddening in this country sometimes.  There is great precedent for this dilemma throughout American history, going all the way back to the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s and even earlier.  After all what were the New Deal, the paranoia of the 1950s, the culture shocks of the 60s and 70s, the modern conservative movement, the so-called culture wars of the past thirty years, and the Tea Party but visceral emotional reactions to changing circumstances in the world at large?  At the same time, the rational skeptics, the intellectuals, and the scientists grow further disconnected from the seething masses, and that vital line of communication begins to break down, making public policy more and more dysfunctional.  We believe anything that feels right to us, especially if the rational evidence is counterintuitive.  To that end, our illiteracy is killing us--figuratively in our dysfunctional social policy, and literally in the case of vaccine denialism and wholistic medicine.

I don't have a ready solution to this.  I only attained the level of understanding that I did because of a very specific set of circumstances.  Mike was emblematic of a very typical kind of American: emotionally adolescent, not quite self-aware enough to recognize the cause of his problems, publicly immature, and much more keen to trust his gut instinct than his intellect regardless of what he may have believed.  At the same time, swinging all the way over to the other side and trusting your thoughts to the exclusion of your emotions like Nick the Magic Unicorn does doesn't work either.  Sure, you may have a more accurate picture of what's going on in a broad sense, but you're still missing the details, and forget about trying to connect and communicate with someone who isn't exactly like you.  It's up to us as individuals to find the balance and discover our own particular formulas for looking at things the way they are, rather than how they feel to us or what we think alone.  This is not a problem endemic to any one gender, subculture, religion, or group.  We need to grow up, and quickly.

You might be wondering now if I'm predicting doom and despair for America as a result of all this.  I am not one of those people.  We humans almost always rise to the occasion when faced with these sorts of dilemmas, and modernity removes most of the restrictions on recovering from such crises.  We have solutions in hand, but putting them into practice is risky and takes what we perceive to be a leap of faith.  I'll end this post with a note of hope, in that as I see it, we're already starting to make that leap.  This is a difficult problem, but not an insurmountable one.

There is a lot more that I want to say on this subject, more than I can fit into one post.  This narrative is far from finished, and so I'll save the rest for another day.  But the next time you're upset about politics, try and stop and think about what you're feeling.  You may not learn anything new and keep right on feeling what you were before.  But you might not.  The chance, however slim, is more than worth it.

Feeling Special

When I get right down to it, all Mike ever wanted was to feel special.  Special is a very, well, special word in our society these days.  From pop songs to self-help books, individual conversations I've had, and my own introspection, it's a very charged subject, and a very emotional one as well.  This guy certainly seems to think so.  I had originally planned this post to talk about Mike and his relationship with partisan talk shows, but as my week has progressed, I find this post has evolved into something a little bit more.  I had a friend link me that particular video, very excited about its message.  There is nothing illegitimate about it, certainly.  However, if self-esteem is limited to feel-good catchphrases and mix-and-match prepackaged identifiers, it is also missing the point.  Self-acceptance without introspection and self-reflection is ultimately meaningless, and potentially dangerous.  So consider this post to be about two things: a post about self-esteem, and a response to how Mike formed his identity.

I dislike any and all philosophies and intellectual movements that were born out of the 1960s for a very specific reason.  In the 1960s, it was very popular to believe that mankind had no inherent nature: that we were all essentially blank slates that life could mold into whatever we wanted.  I believe that that concept is fundamentally flawed.  As any keen observer would note from the past 30 years of our history, mankind does have a very definite innate nature, and that nature often comes into conflict with the civilization we have built.  Certainly, though, it would also be unfair to dismiss this belief outright without first putting it into context.  The previous model had been the other extreme: biological determinism, which gaves rise to eugenics and such horrors as the Holocaust.  The 1950s and early 60s were also the era of Dr. Spock and Carl Rogers, who emphasized nurture over nature, and it was perfectly reasonable to theorize about the other end of the nature/nurture continuum.  The only mistake was to take it too far.  Reality is very seldom one extreme or the other.  It's almost always somewhere in-between or failing that some combination of the two.  But the idea that man is without an inherent nature is also a very dangerous concept -- equally dangerous to the model that it replaced.  Here's why.  If man has no nature, then fact becomes completely subjective.  No one piece of evidence can ever be considered "truth" to the eye of a believer, because there is no basis of measuring it against anything else.  If that's the case, then evidence and proof themselves become meaningless as concepts: it is simply whatever you believe.  And if we humans are good at anything, we'll believe anything we like so long as it validates us and feels good if we get the chance.

Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this.  Despite initially conferring some significant benefits (civil rights, the sexual revolution, women's rights, etc), it also created many of the forms of denialism we now suffer from in our society (science denialism -- specifically climate change denial, vaccine denial, the organic food movement; economic denialism -- modern conservatism's fetishistic obsession with marginal tax rates over all else; and social denialism -- the Evangelical obsession with sexual morality).  And before you accuse me of making this a political argument, this is a problem that cuts across all spheres of political orientation, though I will concede that I believe it is stronger in some than in others.

This makes Mike a fascinating case study.  Mike wore the mantle of "conservative" like a magic cloak: at once a suit of armor and a protective sword with which he could face the world.  Mike however was not a Christian.  Far from it, in fact.  He was an avowed atheist and a self-proclaimed proponent of science.  The science he believed in, however, was completely beholden to the ideology of his conservatism.  Thus, while he blogged on Facebook about Mars rovers and astronomy, homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, and carbon dioxide was not a greenhouse gas.  If humans are good at another thing, it's selectively ignoring the evidence that faces them to support their beliefs.  This is a real problem.  In order to fully explain it, let's turn our attention back to that video at the top of the post.

I am often praised as being "special" or "unique" or "gifted," etc.  However, I try to take all of these labels with a grain of salt.  I did not always, and I wrapped myself up in them just as Mike wore his conservatism.  So let's follow that logic to its conclusion.  I'm special.  All throughout my childhood I was told that I was going to go on and do great things, like cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I still might, but sufficed to say, it hasn't happened yet.  But I'm special.  I just have to cure cancer or invent a quantum computer.  I just have to write a book and get it published.  So what happens when I don't?  Mike was very concerned about this, at least as concerned as I have been at various stages in my life.  But what exactly is success?  Can we even quantify it?  Or define it, for that matter?  If it's a subjective measure, one of two things will happen: either we'll meet our goal (however realistic or unrealistic) and then after the initial high wears off we'll go right back to wanting bigger or brighter things.  That is, unless we fail, in which case we feel incredibly disappointed.  Our disappointment either leaves us bitter, or we counter it by coming up with reasons why, all of which seem only to self-validate us and miss the point.  After all, we deserved it.  The logic begins to break down.  The truth of the matter is, there is nothing that dictates something HAS to happen, at least as far as human life is concerned.  We're born, we grow old, we get sick, and we die.  These are the only certainties in life.  We are beholden to a biological body and a brain that was designed to be a hunter-gatherer, and it trips us up.  So you can call yourself special.  What does it get you?  Just a false expectation.

Now you're probably saying to yourself "Oh, now he's being one of those negative 'get over yourselves' cynics."  That would be true if I were then going on to say that that meant we shouldn't have hopes and dreams, and aspire to greatness.  You'll notice I very carefully did not.  I might become world-famous.  I might not.  Disconnecting yourself from the need allows you to want all you desire.  But there's no expectation or subsequent disappointment or letdown.  Things are what they are, for better or worse.  Really whether you're a conservative, a Christian, a hippie, a Buddhist, old, young, one or more or all of these things, the principle is the same.  Self-acceptance is perhaps the most deceptively simple idea mankind ever came up with.  What good is belief if you can't question it?  What good is self-esteem if you don't truly know yourself?  You'll fall right back into those two traps again and again.

I suppose then that this was Mike's truly fatal flaw.  He couldn't question himself.  There is a lot of talk of people being irrational these days.  I don't think that's entirely accurate.  Most people are perfectly rational on a functional level given what they know.  However, many people are either uninformed or worse yet, misinformed.  Logic and reason are only as good as the evidence that supports them.  But neither is the solution to throw logic out the window.  We make the best decisions we can based upon the information available to us.  Humans crave certainty, but there is very little to go around, save for birth, ageing, sickness, and death.  These are not very palatable for most of us.  So we search for deep and concrete meaning everywhere we look.  This produces both tremendous good and tremendous damage.  I can't label it wrong, because the good and the bad are two sides of the same coin.  One could not exist without the other.  So it becomes the central paradox of life: we were meant to search, but the end of the search is the realization and acceptance that there's nothing to search for.  Most people die still desperately searching.  We do great things in the name of this search, and commit terrible crimes.  The search is who we are.  But like with everything, there's an upside and a downside.

So to bring this back to the beginning, are we special?  Well, if we are, so is everyone else.  But if everyone is special, what does special mean, exactly?  We wear our identities as a way of feeling unique, but if everyone is unique, then we're essentially all the same.  I personally prefer to avoid the argument altogether.  I am what I am.  Trying to assign a label or an expectation to myself only hurt me in the end, and hurt a lot of other people too in the process.  You have to search for a very long time to figure that out.  It can't be taught.  So in conclusion, I'd say keep searching.  It's the journey that makes our lives meaningful.  But try to remember how the search ends, and keep it in mind.  Maybe you won't get what you want, but you'll feel better in the end.

Mike the Broken GI Joe

After a week and a half-long absence, I'm back.  I'd put the blog on hold while I finished up my latest manuscript, which commanded my full attention for the past ten to twelve days.  I have a new arc of posts that I'd like to do here, building off what I've written in the past few months.  I'm going to start by talking about someone specific: a friendship that went terribly, terribly wrong.  But this story, and its moral, are bigger than any one post.  To truly do it justice will take an entire week of blogging.  It covers a lot of ground, and brings up a lot of the themes I've written about thus far.  So, without further ado, I give you Mike the Broken GI Joe.

Mike could have been a great man if his life hadn't intervened.  He was attractive, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and imaginative.  Some of the most tragic people are the ones who seemed to have all the elements of greatness but for a fatal flaw.  In that sense Mike is an incredible tragedy, the story of a would-be genius done in by insecurity and fear.  For if anybody I ever knew embodied fear and a hopeless insecurity of oneself, it would be Mike.  Mike and I were destined to be great friends for a very long time -- ten years -- but that friendship was ultimately doomed.

Back in 2000 and 2001, Mike ran a music review website that specialized in obscure and underground metal -- the kind you don't hear on the radio, and exactly the kind that I had just begun to listen to en masse.  The number of bands he introduced me to that I still listen to even now is almost too big to list: Opeth, Katatonia, Agalloch, Mercenary, Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, Evergrey, Sentenced, Theory in Practice, to say nothing of the Children of Bodom and In Flames mix CDs we traded a full decade before they became popular.  It was a prodigious time for me: I was seventeen and coming of age, just starting to figure out my identity.  Mike was in many ways a mentor to that identity: an older brother figure I'd lacked.  Mike embodied a certain kind of machismo and masculinity I still struggle with to this day: aggressive, cynical, and wholly unaware of itself.  He was cool in the way that adolescent boys aspire to be.  Here was one of the cools kids from high school taking me under his wing.  I lacked any self-awareness to perceive his flaws.


Mike was a former Marine, an aggressive clubber and womanizer, and an ardent opponent of illegal immigration despite being a quarter Mexican.  He was tough and mean because he perceived himself to be constantly under attack, whether by real or imagined foe alike.  He worried constantly that he was a failure, a weakling, or socially compromised, even though this was almost never reflected in what he said.  It's always the people whose actions are inconsistent with their words that are the most dangerous, and Mike's thoughts always seemed to reflect his words, not his actions.

Even still, our relationship, though sometimes distant and sometimes more intimate, remained steady.  I wanted his approval.  He was a validator: he told me I was all right.  Two things changed, though as the years went on.  The first was me.  The other was him.  It was to be our undoing.

I have written extensively about a certain kind of cynicism I notice in people who feel insecure and threatened.  I know others like this: uncompromising, rigid, perenially disappointed.  In fact, as far as heterosexual male friends go, I seem irresistably attracted to them.  It's at once a strict form of idealism, and the experience of being crushed under the weight of one's beliefs.  Mike was the living embodiment of that type.  I knew what he wanted to be.  He wanted to be an intellectual.  He wanted to feel smart and respected for his intellect.  But during the critical years when that part of one's identity forms, he lacked the discipline or the financial means.  I've seen so many like him.  The failed intellectual is the most dangerous kind of all.  Without a requisite self-awareness, reason always devolves into misinformation and the worst kinds of self-righteousness.  One need only look to many of history's great revolutions (French, Soviet) for exmaples of this kind of thinking put into practice.  One of my favorite authors, the great religion scholar Stephen Prothero, likes to describe this as the following: "The most dangerous game man ever plays is dividing people into the good guys and bad guys and suggesting that the bad guys be punished."

At some point between 2008 and 2010, the weight of Mike's disappiontment began to finally crush him once and for all.  I saw warning signs: frequent links to Glenn Beck and his radio and television shows; conspiracy theories; paranoid delusions of the government and groups of designated "others" out to get him.  But I still needed him to validate me, so I ignored them.  It was, however, also around this time -- 2010 especially -- that I began to change.  I had gained a level of self-awareness and inner peace that I finally felt comfortable expressing myself outwardly to the greater world, for all my virtues and flaws.  And I was not like Mike at all.  There was a time when Mike and I could share that certain cynicism about the world.  But as I've grown older and up, my own cynicism and disappointment seems only to be diminishing, not increasing.  I was never a pessimist.  A realist, yes, but an optimist to my core.  I do genuinely believe that human beings are basically good.  I don't know when I began publicly asserting this, but it marked the beginning of the end for our friendship.  Neither of us are very good at shutting up, and at least until recent months, I wasn't particularly good at letting go of a fight.  Mike made certain assumptions about the way the world worked.  I made others, and we disagreed.  Our clashes grew more intense by the week, and started getting personal.  As I came to realize, Mike lacked the ability to distinguish attacks on his words and actions, and attacks on his person.  I still do believe that at his core he's a genuinely good person, just terribly misguided.  In many ways, people like him are far more dangerous than the truly malicious and evil.

There was no ultimate confrontation between us.  I simply unfriended him from Facebook and removed any means for him to contact me otherwise.  I think that was for the best.  I don't hate him.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I pity him.  He was in many ways pathetic and broken; a failed person.  Understanding Mike has allowed me to understand so much more about the world.  He was in some respect one of the catalysts to my own self-realization.  And for the better part of a decade, he was a good friend to me.  People have called him a douchebag, and he may have been nasty and tone-deaf to others sensitivies, but that doesn't make him a bad person.  He may have been in the process of flaming out when I knew him, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from him.  The lessons his example has taught me will form the next several parts to this story.  For now, though, I think I'll leave it at Mike the person.  Destruction always saddens me, particularly destruction seemingly without a purpose, and Mike is no different.  It didn't have to be this way.  So I mourn, not only for our friendship, but for his own inability to be happy.  As for me, however, the end of my relationship with Mike would come to be the beginning of a realization on my part of just how wonderful the world truly is.  Stay tuned for the sequel tomorrow.

Atheism

Ja, ve are nihilists.  We don't believe in anysink!

Any discussion I undertake about music is inevitably going to lead me to talk about metal, and any discussion I undertake about religion is inevitably going to lead me to talk about atheism.  The two are actually more closely linked than a lot of people think, but what links them together may be surprising.  Maybe I can do this in one post; maybe I'll need two.  We'll see.

When I think of metal, I think of a friend I knew when I was younger who I'll call Mike.  Mike has had a huge impact on my life over the years, even though we're no longer speaking.  He really deserves his own post; more than one, actually.  But since this is a post about metal and atheism, I'll talk this time about the greatest thing Mike did for me, which was introduce me to many of the bands and artists who have had the greatest influence over my young life.

The year was 2000, and I'd been "officially" a practictioner of the alternate lifestyle for about three years.  In those three years I was kicked out of two high schools and got into probably three dozen fights.  I was at the age where anger and frustration with the world synergizes so perfectly with adolescent self-absorption, and boy was I ever pissed.  I like to think I had good reason to be: I was dateless, most of my friendships were in ruins, I was going on my third school in as many years, and even though I had plenty of people to blame, in my heart I knew even then that this was all my own damn fault.  In its purest form, I truly believe metal is an expression that one can see little or no beauty in the world, and when that ability is taken away all we're left with is our pain, anguish, anger, and spite at everything else.  For my adolescent years, it was a match made in heaven (or, erm, hell).

Mike ran a website that reviewed popular metal bands and albums of the time, particularly those that were part of a movement in the genre that came out of scandanavia in the mid-to-late 90s and crested in the first half of this decade.  Primarily focused on the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, these included bands that would later find commercial success in the US such as In Flames, Arch Enemy, Soilwork, Children of Bodom, and Dimmu Borgir.  Generally speaking, as far as music goes, if it's popular in the US, I tend to dislike it, but if it's popular in Europe, I tend to like it a lot more (the crossover metal/progressive rock band Dream Theater is a notable exception).  In the span of a year, from late 2000 to the end of 2001, Mike and his website introduced me to literally hundreds of bands that received repeated play time.  I spent probably upwards of two thousand dollars on CDs and merchandise that year, and my collection grew from about 50 albums to close to five hundred.  But it was more than music I'd bought: it was an attitude, an image, a lifestyle.  I grew my hair long and wore dingy band shirts.  I cursed.  I spat.  I was generally an angry dick.  But as far as being an angry dick went, whatever I could do, Mike could do a hundred times better.  The world was as bleak and dark to us as the music we listened to.

One thing people don't seem to appreciate about metal is how much like classical music it is.  Metal, no matter how noise-like and unmusical it may seem, has and always will be about emotion.  In particular, it is about negative emotion, and the intensity of the anger and the bitterness of the music and musicians reflects the anger and bitterness of its listeners.  The whole Satanic motif is only useful as a means to an end as far as imagery goes: the message is really about atheism and nihilism, not a belief or worship of Satan.  This is something the traditional critics of metal have had a really hard time understanding.  Mike was at his core a nihilist, like I was for those years, even though I called myself a Buddhist.

There is an emotional tendency of human beings to view things and speak of them in absolutes.  This is just as true for a belief in nothing as it is a belief in God or the Bible.  As I approach the age of 27, theologically I really only draw two lines in the sand anymore, both of which I learned the hard way. The first is the belief that one's own spiritual or moral problem and prescription is necessarily true of anyone and everyone else.  I resoundly reject this.  The other has to do with the rigidity or absolutism of one's faith and/or practice..  Either one of these beliefs, however they're practiced, at best guarantees the practitioner will do not good in the world and at worst will cause a great deal of damage to those around them and the world at large.  Every atheist and everyone who appreciates metal the way I used to has for whatever reason been unwilling or unable to see beauty in the world.  They have also been unbelievably rigid in their belief of this, and insisted that others come to the same conclusion.  Stephen Prothero, in his various non-fiction books on religion, likes to call a fundamentalist "a religious practitioner who is angry at something."  The same applies here.  Whether you're angry at the world like a metalhead, angry at modernity like a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, or just angry at religion, you have ceded control of that part of yourself to the emotion, and you will cause harm, not the least of which to yourself.  This has not been an easy lesson for me to learn.  Anger and hate are very easy and convenient sentiments, because they allow us to avoid responsibility for our actions.  Which is not to say anger is wholly or inherently bad and call for its elimination: rage is as human as joy and compassion and therefore just as legitimate.  But we have to be careful how we digest and carry that rage, and deny it power over us.  This was to have significant consequences between me and Ken, as I will write in the coming days.  So let this serve not as an admonition, but merely a caution.  When you believe there is nothing good and reedeeming to the world, or even if you simply believe that as a net result on a theological balance sheet, you're going to have a very hard time controlling your anger and your hate, and you're going to have an even harder time maintaining a balance between the positive and the negative: thus you will cause harm to yourself and others.

All this is not to say that I don't still enjoy metal.  Negative emotions are every bit as important to us as positive ones, myself included.  But the dark side does have the ability to infect and take over the light in a way that the light does not really have the ability to do the reverse, at least in most people I know.  So we can't let it be the only way.  There is always beauty and positivity if you're wiling to see it, even in tragedy and misfortune.  The real tragedy, and the true misfortune, is that so few of us are willing to see it.

The Prophet Arjen and Notes on Psychosis

Arjen Anthony Lucassen is more epic than you,
as this green screen clearly shows.

Any post that follows my feelings towards the musician Neal Morse and continues to talk about music, spirituality, and life, must inevitably lead to Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his various projects.  Arjen Lucassen is somewhat of an oddity in the metal and progressive rock genre, in that he's known more for being a composer than being in a band.  From the mid-90s to 2008, he had a long-running project of interconnected rock operas featuring a plethora of the best and brightest vocalists in the two genres called Ayreon, and it was Ayreon that provided the soundtrack to most of my lunatic meditation sessions last spring and summer.  I can't talk about myself and what I went through without also talking about Ayreon and the story and the man behind it, too.  Let this post fill in the blanks.

Ayreon is as much a story as it is music.  I'll spare the reader most of the details, as the plot is highly complex with a large cast of characters and many suplots, each told out through five operas, all but one of them double-albums.  At its root, there is a race of aliens, called Forever, who have become so dependent and indistinguishable from their technology that they have ceased to feel, grow, evolve, and change, and are forever frozen in a permanent state of eternal waking stasis, unable to feel either pleasure or pain.  Their home planet is called Y, and is purported to be in the Andromeda galaxy, though in the final opera 01011001 it is claimed they are capable of sending a comet to Earth in a reasonable length of time, so perhaps Planet Y is instead located in the Milky Way.  Mankind is their experiment, designed to help them relearn how to think freely and feel.  Over the millenia, they have conducted various experiments on selected humans to help further this aim.  These experiments form the rock opera INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE.

Separately, on Earth, another plot unfolds regarding the demise of man in a nuclear war in the year 2084, which is witnessed by the last surviving human: a colonist on Mars (which forms the two albums THE DREAM SEQUENCER and FLIGHT OF THE MIGRATOR).  Before the war, a group of scientists attempted to warn the past of impending disaster due to global warming, environmental degredation, disease, and chronic conflict by sending messages into the past.  However, the warning, instead of going where intended, finds itself in the hands of a blind mistrel in Dark Ages England named Ayreon (which forms the basis of the first opera, THE FINAL EXPERIMENT, as well as one of the main plots of the last opera, 01011001).  In addition, one of the Forever uses a device called the Dream Sequencer to complete their experiments and fulfill mankind's intended purpose, which forms the basis of the remaining album THE HUMAN EQUATION.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Admittedly, I am a huge fan.  But it is significant for another, far more important reason.  To explain this, I am going to have to explain a little bit about how my psychosis and my dissociations worked.

Before there was Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, there was a world.  This world took many forms, but it always possessed the same properties: it was utopian to those who had power, dystopian to those who didn't, and in it I forced the will of my beliefs onto its form and shape.  I'm not entirely sure how long it's existed for me.  It seems like it's been a part of me for as long as I can remember.  It started out simplistically, sure -- often the result of an imagined encounter with a djinn.  What I wanted was power.  I was bullied in school, both a scapegoat and target, and my relationship with my parents growing up was both complicated and ambiguous in a way that didn't exactly engender a positive worldview.  I dreamed of escaping it all, and slowly those daydreams coalesced into something living and breathing.  As I grew older, I began to explore the flip-side of all that power, and the dynamic contained therein, and so was born the world.  It was my own private alternate universe, one very few ever got to see.  The world of THE ACADEMY is very loosely based on it, as are a number of my short stories, but the purest expressions of it I never showed to anyone.  Its four prophets were Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, who came to embody the narrative of the world and how it changed, grew, evolved, and eventually was redeemed.

I would not exactly hallucinate when I lost touch with reality.  The only description I can provide would be for you to try to imagine having two realities superimposed onto each other.  There was me, and my apartment in Portsmouth, and my fiancee, Prescott Park, and the hospital where my psychiatrist works.  There was also Jennifer and her machine world, Emma and her life, AK and his campaign of terror, and Haley and her kingdom.  It was possible for any of them, or me, to slide back and forth between these worlds.  But sliding was just about all I could do, for the most part, unless something else could help me penetrate the barrier between them.

Enter Ayreon, and in particular the opera 01011001.  There were many things that could breach the fantasy world, but 01011001 was always the most effective.  Jennifer identified with the Forever.  Emma liked the theme.  AK identified with the apocalyptic aspects of it, and Haley understood what it meant to me.  01011001 was playing on my headphones on probably at least three-fourths of my meditations.  I could even see myself in there, as Arjen Lucassen's autobiographical hippie character and would-be prophet, by the time of this story now aged and in a mental hospital, his prophecy ignored in one of my favorite songs "The Truth is in Here."  Other things -- songs, people, stories, characters -- could penetrate the world.  Ayreon tied it all together, and grounded me in this world.  It was to Arjen Lucassen's operas that I fought my demons, and slowly began to come to terms with my illness and get it under control.

To that end, as I later learned, 01011001 was written at a time of personal distress for Arjen Lucassen.  My favorite music always seems to be produced during times of great trauma, stress, and pain for the artist that writes it.  As a writer, I can certainly attest to the power of putting yourself into your art.  It's that element of the artist's personal struggle that makes their art so great to me, like I can feel and experience their own pain and suffering in some small way.  01011001 oozes with pain, guilt, regret, and frustration.  Arjen even took it to another level shortly after he concluded the Ayreon saga by creating a side project specifically to address those feelings, Guilt Machine, the year after 01011001 was released.  There are things that I think and things that I feel, and music is something that I feel.  My favorite musicians are all like me: artists for whom the emotion of the music always shows through regardless of the content.  Which is why 01011001 feels as personal to me as one of Neal Morse's TESTIMONY albums: Lucassen's pain is palpable throughout.  When I'm feeling sad or depressed or low, I don't want to be cheered up.  I just don't want to feel alone.  Listened to, really.  01011001 hears those prayers and delivers a resounding response: "I understand."  So I listen, and I feel better.

Some people are like this; some aren't.  Maybe ten years ago I would have felt like there was a right way or a wrong way to appreciate music, but I don't anymore.  What I've come to appreciate the most about people over the past year is just how different our needs can be.  Kari, my fiancee (her real name, used because it would be nearly impossible to conceal her identity), takes quite a different approach.  Her favorite band is The Flower Kings, who she listens to specifically because it cheers her up.  This is not just true of music, either, as I've written about in previous posts.  When I read a story or listen to music, I want something that will break that barrier between me and it, and the barriers within me as well.  To that end, Arjen Lucassen is the master, and I'd be hard-pressed not to like anything he produces.

The Gospel According to Neal

Religion and spirituality has been on my mind a lot these days, and after giving it some thought, I've decided that I can't really talk about my spirituality without also talking about music.  Both are deeply connected to my psyche and my emotions, so much so that they're almost tangled up in one another.  That isn't a problem for me, in fact I enjoy it quite a bit and it brings me tremendous benefits.  It plays into my obsessive nature and my means of regulating myself.  As such, while I want to talk about religion and what it means to me, this post is probably going to turn into a musical review of sorts, because I can't really talk about my religious practices without talking about the prophets of my religion, and one prophet in particular who goes by the name of Neal Morse.

Sorry, Neal.  I love you, but you still look like a church boy.

That's Neal on the right there.  Neal was not the first musical prophet of my life -- in fact, he's one of the most recent.  The first belongs to Jimmy Buffett, the object of much obsession for me as a child.  Jimmy gave way, strangely enough, to Metallica, Metallica begot Corrosion of Conformity, who begot Arcturus, who in turn begot Opeth, then the metal bands Mercenary and Katatonia joined Opeth in a pantheon, who in turn yielded influence to Dream Theater, then Ayreon, which lastly brings me to Spock's Beard, and the man behind Spock's Beard, Neal Morse.  Sound convoluted?  It's enough to make a Yoruba practictioner's head swirl.

For the longest time, I felt trapped when I talked about music.  Like any teenager, I tended to believe that my personal opinion was objective truth, and that led to many an argument over music between friends and enemies alike.  What I've come to realize about music is that it isn't necessarily the quality that makes it for me (though I do primarily listen to progressive rock, so take this with a grain of salt), but rather what it means to me that makes it good.  I used to be one of those metal snobs who wouldn't listen to anything they played on American radio, but for most of my life I probably couldn't tell you what made the bands I listened to good.  Ultimately, what I decided, after I had fully converted to my cult of Ayreon/Arjen Anthony Lucassen- and Spock's Beard/Neal Morse-ism was that it was music's power to affect me positively that ultimately determined its relative strengths and weaknesses.  Had you asked me two years ago what I listen to, I would have unequivocably told you "Metal."  Now, I'd simply say anything that happens to move me, regardless of genre or label.  Arjen Anthony Lucassen, the man behind Ayreon, will get his own post tomorrow, because it's Neal whose personal story compels me more, and that story is reflected through his music.

Like me, Neal was a struggling artist for most of his youth, a musician of immense talent who couldn't quite put it all together into material success until later in his life.  His band, Spock's Beard, became one of the most successful acts of the late 90's prog revival, along with Dream Theater, The Flower Kings, and Porcupine Tree.  In fact, Neal has frequently worked with former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.  Don't get me wrong, I like Dream Theater too, but unique among all the prog bands of that era was the amount of himself Neal put into his music.  He alone wrote almost all of Spock's Beard's songs, and many of them are not only quite technically complex and beautiful, but also mesmerizing in their ability to stir my emotions.  His singing voice, deep for a prog singer and nasal, has always had a tremendous capacity to soothe me.  Over the course of five albums in the span of six years, he poured his heart and soul and all of his energy into some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard.  Then, in 2002, immediately following the release of his magnum opus, the double concept album Snow, he seemingly very suddenly and abruptly became a born-again Christian, left the band, and moved to Nashville, Tennessse to pursue a solo career in gospel and Christian music.

I came to Spock's Beard in the fall of 2010, shortly before I attended Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity (another fulcrum point of my life, which I will write more about as the narrative unfolds).  Spock's Beard has gone on to release another four albums without Neal (drummer Nick D'Virgilio took over the job of vocals), and the change to me was very abrupt.  It had seemed, if the lyrics and Wikipedia were any guide, that Neal had simply gone crazy and had an epic meltdown.  As it turned out, there was a public record of this, as he then recorded a double-album about his experiences becoming born-again, which to me only seemed to deepen the mystery, not solve it.  It wasn't until literally the past month, when I gained access to the album's sequel (and, I came to understand, Neal was ready to tell the rest of his story).  What it told was a story of self-loathing, frustration, hearbreak, longing, and self-doubt that could only be gained by simply listening to what he had to say, rather than trying to study notes or websites.  What astonishes me the most about his story is how close to my story it seems to be.

I know very few people who have as much access to as much of themselves as Neal appears to, and even fewer who can so ably and directly express it through their art.  It is a skill I've had no choice but to learn as I try to fight my own demons.  And yet still, the way in which Neal appears to have broken to me under the weight of his burdens makes me deeply uneasy.  It serves as both a testimony and a reminder that life is not an upward spiral -- that at any moment there can be both a tremendous breakthrough or enormous damage.

I think it's very hard to manage life's complexities and tribulations without having some sort of mythos or spiritual system.  I've yet to meet an avowed atheist who was happy about life or the world they live in.  Most seem to treat nonexistence as a release from their misery, which at least to me seems like kind of a bummer.  Which is not to say that I think their position is any more or less reasonable than living this life for immortality in the next.  Life presents us a great many different existential problems, which we all try to solve in our own way as we live.  But there's a particular kind of self-loathing many born-again Christians seem to embody, and a particular kind a cynicism that seems to go along with it (though which comes first to me is a chicken and egg problem), and while I decided on a different solution to it, I appreciate Neal, his story, and his music and can connect with it as deeply as I do precisely because he can communicate it so well.  Every person I've ever met has had some inclination towarsd nihilism and some inclination towards hope, and it's how exactly the two are balanced (both quantitatively and qualitatively) that seems to shape one's outlook the most.  The two can often be confused for each other, as well.  The Rapture is a story of hope, but that hope is based upon a tremendously nihilistic premise.  Buddhism, my chosen religion, is not immune to this phenomenon, either.  I've used the Dharma both to secure myself and inflict pain on myself.

Whatever the reason, it's clear to me that Neal Morse spent most of the past two decades in unimaginable pain, and he found an outlet for it through his music.  At the end of the day, (incidentally, also the name of my favorite Spock's Beard song), what matters more in life are the outcomes more than the processes themselves that led to them.  I may not know Neal Morse, but I feel like I understand his pain, and I feel like if we met, he could understand mine, too.  For that, he occupies a place in my spiritual life, despite the differences of our respective religions.  And his music always moves me, even his Christian praise songs (for more on my views of God, consult the post "The Day I Met God").  So, to sum up both my feelings on music and religion and tie this all together: in the end, it doesn't really matter what you like and what you believe, as long as it gets you where you need to go.  It's a difficult answer to a complex question, but I believe it to be the truth nonetheless.

The Day I Met God

On June 22nd, 2010, at about eight o'clock in the evening, I met the Cosmic Spirit of the Universe on a mud flat on Peirce Island in downtown Portsmouth, and for about twenty minutes, we talked.  I want to do a whole bunch of posts on spirituality and music, and since I started talking about my life, I've wanted to keep a cohesive narrative.  This is the beginning.  My blog started as a blog about religion on Facebook, and this will bring it full circle.  But it occurs to me that before I start talking about spirituality, I ought to lay my own spiritual cards on the table.  So much of spirituality is perspective, and so before I can begin to comment and critique the perspective of others, I should talk about my own.

I was raised nominally Jewish, but I was more or less an atheist for most of my life.  Now I prefer to think of myself as neither and atheist nor a theist.  I converted to Buddhism when I was fifteen because I was seeking a way out of a seemingly endless cycle of violence in my life, but I didn't really start practicing until I met the Cosmic Spirit of the Universe last June, (or God, for you monotheists out there).  God and Buddhism is something of a non-sequitur, but hopefully after I explain it, it'll start to make sense.

This began, like with so many things, with a walk to the waterfront.  My walks had their own sort of evolution: first to the swing set at the bottom of the hill my building is located on, then to the end of the complex, then to the first major intersection ten minutes away, then Prescott Park, and finally Peirce Island.  Really is was time alone with my thoughts I wanted, and thanks to a mild winter, I had more or less free reign of the city streets and parks by myself from when I started in early March to May.  But Memorial Day marks the beginning of tourist season here in Portsmouth, and with it most modicums of privacy along the Piscataqua.  By June, my runs had extended all the way to the very end of the paths on Peirce Island, a full four miles from my home round-trip.  I was looking for a good place to wait out the sunset in solitude, but all of my usual spots were already occupied.  Until now, I had mostly concerned myself with the Piscataqua side of Peirce Island, where I believed all the good views were.  But there is another side to the island, that faces a back channel that overlooks the both South End of the city and the bridge to Newcastle Island.  I passed it every day, but never really noticed it before.  Walking on a path through thick woods, I came to an overlook that was clouded with gnarled locusts.  Wanting a better look, I took a step forward, where I could see a small path that appeared to cut through the trees and lead downward.  When I emerged on the other side, I beheld the face of God.

A sudden stillness immediately enveloped me.  It was just about eight o'clock, and the sun was setting through a shapely tree on the west end of the island that made it look like it was aflame.  It was low tide, exposing a vast mud flat where burrowing clams spat out water here and there in little squirts.  About a hundred feet away, a heron picked for shellfish.  The gentlest of all breezes blew onto my chest.  In the direction of the sun, I beheld everything there was to the universe and everything that ever would be, a sensation I have only ever experienced again deep in meditation.

I've been psychotic before.  Psychosis for me is the addition of something – the layering of a superimposed reality on top of my own.  This was very different.  This was a glimpse at reality itself.  There was nothing otherworldly or exterior about it.  I stood there, enraptured, staring at the sun, the water, the mud, the trees, and the bird, the houses made of wood, the church steeples, the clams just below the surface, the bridge, and the docked boats, and it was as if all of them were one single entity that spoke with a single voice that knew me better than I knew myself.  We communicated not with words, just with strange primal gut feelings that had no verbal or even intellectual equivalent.

I remember, in this strange language I suddenly found I could speak, asking it what it was, and my answer came as an understanding that all these things I saw were in fact interdependent parts of the same whole, and that I was intrinsically linked to them as well.  It was a profound realization.  What followed next was a conversation of such subtlety and nuance I can hardly do it justice with the written word.  What was my purpose, I asked.  Should I have believed in You?  No, God replied.  My purpose was here on Earth.  The Cosmic Spirit had nothing to offer me.  My divine mission was simply to get better.  God couldn't help me with that – that could only come from within me.  I was on my own.  I asked it for help, guidance – something, anything.  I already knew the truth, God said.  I already had all the answers, I just didn't know it yet.  As if for emphasis, two dogs came running out of the bush and began frolicking in the water, like I had been transported to Suzie Salmon's heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.  The sun set a few minutes later.

I walked off the shore in the twilight in an absolute trance.  I tripped over the curb.  I almost got hit by a car twice.  I wasn't just seeing things anymore.  I looked at the lobster boats docked at the wharf and I saw them brand new, just put out to sea, and I also saw them rusted and wrecked, decommissioned.  A few minutes later in the flower garden at Prescott Park I came upon a sculpted dogwood and saw it as a sapling, and later turned to dust as it was dead and dessicated.  A hundred years ago, none of this had been here, and a hundred years after all of this would likely be gone.  It was only when my fiancée called me to tell me she was coming home from work that the spell was finally broken and I walked home.

The core of  Buddhist teachings is called the Four Noble Truths.  The first Noble Truth states very simply that all life suffers.  The second explains that our suffering is caused by the impermanence of things, our attachment and desire and craving.  The solution is the acceptance of things, the acceptance of impermanence, and the Noble Eightfold Path (the fourth truth) provides a guide to put it all into practice.  It was only after I got home and picked up a Thich Nhat Hanh book I had lying around that I realized what it was I had perceived, and what I had been doing on my walks.  From that moment on I considered myself a practicing Buddhist.

I'm not sure what it was I encountered there on the beach that night.  It doesn't really matter.  I could give it a name and call it God, but to try to assign any label or explanation to it would not only be futile, it would be to miss the point.  We try to seek a higher meaning in everything that we do, like our suffering and the trials and pitfalls of being human is for some great purpose or design, but in our quest for understanding we blind ourselves to the meaning that's already there.  What I felt was neither male nor female, human or otherworldly.  It may have even just been something deep inside me.  I don't know, and I don't really care.  It just simply was.  That's why I say that I neither believe nor don't believe in God.  Whatever it was was supremely indifferent – it told me as much, and if I was looking for a purpose, I found it there without really looking for it.  Nothing had changed except my perception.  It truly does not matter to me what that actually was – it was the realization and the awakening that followed that was important.

Incidentally, I count that as a major turning point in a battle against my illness.  It was the start of a long road of forgiveness and acceptance that continues to this day.  The journey itself is far more important than the vessel you take to undergo it.  I don't want to be sick anymore.  That's my mission.  The rest seems to have just written itself along the way, and it continues to do so, up to and including this post.

What more could I ask for?

A Modest Defense of Harold Camping

The one question I always have: Why are the true believers
always hideously out of shape?

Another weekend has passed, and aside from a mild head trip, I seem to be no worse for the wear.  Which is saying something, considering how many believed Saturday, May 21st to be Judgment Day: the Rapture, the end of time.  I was less considered about eternal judgment and damnation as I was looting an iPad (I figured that a certain percentage of the born-agains had to be of the McMansion class, and I do need a tablet very badly, so it seemed like a good idea at the time), but alas, 'twas not to be.  I didn't personally know anybody who subscribed to this particular prophecy, but there were plenty of publicized examples of people who did.

My social network was, however, pretty evenly split on the subject.  There were those of us (mostly younger), who simply took it in jest.  I count myself among those.  Some weeks I'm really searching for material to make light of, and some weeks it falls into my lap.  This doomsday prophecy was a gold mine.  But there was another group in my network -- mostly older, and less humorous -- that took serious  offense to Mr. Camping and his prediction.  They called him a fraud, they called for an investigation, and they demonized him as a symbol of everything that's wrong with the world.  In light of that, I'd like to offer a modest defense of Harold Camping and his prediction, not because I think the guy's right or even sane, but because I think some people may misunderstand what he is and what he did wrong.

I don't think you can call Harold Camping a fraud.  Immature and dangerous, yes, but not a fraud.  I've watched the interviews and read his reactions.  Fraud would imply that he didn't believe in what he was saying.  Bernie Madoff, for example, is a fraud.  Harold Camping is in fact a very extreme example of something that happens to all of us, when we get caught up in our own beliefs and our own point of view, to the exclusion of anything else -- point of fact, something a great deal more dangerous than Bernie Madoff.  In reality, though, everyone does this to some degree.  This happens every day.  Camping's claim is simply much more dramatic, so it receives much more attention.

For the record, I think the absurdity of any religious or pseudoscientific doomsday scenario is inherently funny, and for that it deserves to be mocked.  But as the weekend went on, it became less and less entertaining, and more and more simply pathetic and sad.  We had our fun.  Now we need a moment of self-reflection.  This affected real people: like this family that's now likely been irreparably damaged, or the man who spent his life-savings and now seems desperate to try and justify to himself what he's done.  My more rational friends like to mock this and get riled up about the morality of the situation, but that to me just makes them hypocrites.  How many of us have made an extraneous financial purchase that came back to bite us in the ass?  This happened to me back in March.  Lip Service had this pair of designer pants I really wanted, and I carefully saved my money for three months to afford them.  I bought them at the beginning of the month, and subsequently got saddled with an unforeseen expense that cost just as much.  I made a prediction based on my belief that my finances were more stable, constant, and predictable than they actually were.  It turned out to be a bad decision.  Camping's prophecy is really no different in principle, though of course it's an extreme example.  I can no sooner blame Camping for being the problem than I can blame myself.  Camping or the Rapture isn't the issue here.  Our collective maturity, however, can.

It's a very American thing to blame everyone but oneself for one's problems.  This is not assisted by the current state of the media, where one can effectively shop for opinions and perspectives that one agrees with and call it reality.  My liberal friends love to blame Fox News and the Tea Party for this.  My conservative friends blame Obama and big government and the liberal media.  The fact is, they're exactly the same.  Calling out someone else's hypocrisy is implicit admission of your own.  So to call Harold Camping a fraud or a criminal is wrong.  It's the same reason why no matter how much my liberal friends and I howled about Glenn Beck, we couldn't ever actually arrest him, no matter how outrageous or dangerous his actions were.  The American Republic is at its core about suffering fools.  It is in the end both our fundamental flaw and greatest strength.

So, I say give Harold Camping a break.  It's the mature thing to do.