A Place Where We Swim Together
I routinely wake-up at two in the morning. This is because in the Winter I go to bed at seven thirty. Why stay up? It’s black out there. Nothing on the docks. Boats dipping at their lines like nodding jurors. A egret stands frozen under the lone dock light. I hear the Grunts from B dock where seals wallow like massive slugs. I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Maybe they’re discussing Sea Lion Politics. Who’s controlling the House this term. That kind of shit. I don’t know. I’m floating aboard Scruffy. The old boy’s a floating brick. He’s got inch thick fiberglass and thru hulls sealed with 5200. So far so good, he says.
Just wolfed down three cheeseburgers. Now I’m drinking wine. I got the heater blasting my feet. I’m nodding off. One minute I’m staring at my Hitler YouTube video. The next minute I’m awake. Hitler just shot himself. Poor Eva bit on her cyanide tablet. Poor Eva. All she ever wanted was a ring on her finger and look where it got her?
So I go to bed and wake up at two in the morning.
I’m trying to remember a dream. Traces of it tickle my memory. It’s like the dream itself is fucking with me. Like I’m supposed to get points for remembering. The dream will not reveal itself. I know it’s huge, this dream. It’s like I’m staring through a crack in the universe. This dream is greater than anything Lovecraft could imagine.
This dream might be even Bigger than the fucking Vedas.
Okay…I can’t remember the dream. Give me points for trying. Now what?
I can’t get back to sleep.
I grab my phone where it rests beside me like a snoozing dog. Some people I know sleep with a cat. Me, a doggy. But I killed my old dog and I’m all alone now so the cell phone will do. It does everything. I click the on button. I’m blinded by the reassuring light. I reach for my glasses beside the phone. Okay, I’m good. I check the weather. Rain in the forecast. Rain coming. Rivers of rain. Torrents of Rain. Swamping my boat.
I’m sinking. Why am I sinking? Why not? This is a 50 years old boat. It could sink. At any moment it could sink. It’s a wonder this boat is still floating. What the fuck am I doing on this boat in the first place? I must be out of my mind. Get up and check the bilge.
This boat is about to sink.
I’m at the bottom of the sea.
A slimy dockyard sea.
I’m hanging with Leopard Sharks. I drowned because I lived on this boat and one day it sank and I couldn’t get out in time. I never thought about the constant threat of sinking. What kind of moron am I? All these years and I just took it for granted I would not sink. But of course I sank!
I’m dead. I’m dead for maybe a million years. Waiting around for my next assignment.
Now I’m back. My Karma brought me back. I’m a shark. Not a killer shark because I was never a killer. I’m a bottom feeding shark because that was me as a human. A bottom feeder. I’m swimming with my fellow bottom feeders, blind, feeding wit my homies, swimming the dark waters, nosing the muck…what do I think? I don’t fucking think. I’m a Leopard Shark. I’m grooving in the muck. Eating shit. I’m not cold in the dark ocean depths. I’m a shark. I feel fine.
Jesus Fucking Christ…
So I’m trying to get back to sleep. I’m holding the phone. A thought comes to me.
The Id. The Id? Yeah, the Id. I’m thinking about the Id. Why did the Id come to me? It came to me out of nowhere. Okay, the Id. So I google the Id.
Sigmund Freud invented the Id
I knew this already but I’m thin on details. So now it’s three in the morning. I can’t get back to sleep because I’m reading up on the Id.
Freud invented the Id
He talked to a hysterical lady. He talk to some others. Freud’s a good guy. He’s a good listener. His mother told him always listen. Don’t be a loudmouth. Listen.
Attractive lady, Freud’s Mother. I can see where he came up with the Oedipus Complex. Anyway, Freud learned to listen. He became a doctor and he listened to his patients. He listened so well he made a career out of it. He invented psychoanalysis. This is where the Id comes in. From listening to his patients he learned about this space where everything comes from. Before, it was not taken seriously, this place. It was just sleep. You go to sleep and maybe you dream.
This nothing is actually The Unconscious Mind.
The idea of the unconscious mind had been around for a long time. A place where the mind stores stuff. A place of primal knowledge. Where the Gods speak. A wellspring of creativity.
What Freud did was give the unconscious mind a hard legitimacy. In other words, he mapped it:
That’s right. He took the Unconscious mind and the Conscious Mind (which were already known and discussed by William James among others) and he cooked up the Ego and The Super Ego and finally the ID. The ID is the Unconscious Mind. It’s the place where all your savage desires dwell. It’s where your heinous urges propagate. Shit floats around in this realm. You’re the Leopard Shark, right? Grooving in all this murky shit. All the nasty shit your Ego needs to keep under control. The ego keeps shit in check. It’s the cap on the well, preventing the gusher. The Super Ego creates Morals for your Ego to follow. This is a half-ass explanation but good enough for government work. The upshot is, Freud had this thing for his mother. OR maybe not. Maybe he saw it in others. He listened. He made the ID all about repressed sexual desires. First you kill your father then you have sex with your mother. This is your ID talking. Sure, there’s way more in the ID but Freud saw the bad shit. He saw what happens when the ID takes control of a man’s life. When repressed desires gush forth!
Okay, now it’s four a.m.
I’m thinking of my repressed sexual desires. How l wanted to screw my mother. Kill my father. Then turn Gay and go down on dudes in public toilets.
Did I really want to have sex with my poor mother? I can’t remember. Did I repress it? And what about Bobby Lee, my old man? He had problems but I don’t remember wanting to kill him. I thought I liked him. He was always good to me. He was never around but the times he was he was nice to me.
And what about me being a Fag? I mean a Queer? I mean Gay?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that
.Am I a Homo? I don’t think I am. Maybe I am but I don’t know I am. Maybe my Ego is holding back all the secret urges. The vile public bathroom stuff. NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
Okay. I need to get ahold of myself here.
I know one thing. When I get the urge to Jack Off. I’m not thinking of a dude. I’m thinking of a woman.
My fantasies involve me doing it with a woman.
Simple as that.
Sorry. I got no Heterosexual Porno to share with you.
I’m trying to get back to sleep!
Okay, I’m fucking done with the ID. You can have the Id. You can have Freud. I want nothing more to do with this shit. This repression crap. You know who makes more sense to me?
Carl Jung.
That’s right. Good old Carl Jung. He might’ve been a Fascist, but put that aside for the moment. He came up with an idea of the Unconscious Mind that I like. And he wasn’t into all the repressed sexual urges shit. He took the Unconscious Mind and he cooked up the Collective Unconscious.
The Collective Unconscious means we all share the ID thing. We’re all together, swimming in the shit. This makes way more sense to me.
Really?
I know, I know. It’s just more HOKUM. Just like the Big Bang Theory and all the other theories these brilliant dudes come up with. All of it is HOKUM.
But this one feels good. It feels good to me. I like the idea of the Collective Unconscious. The Idea that we’re all together in this slimy mess.
Anyway, I can’t get back to sleep.
I guess I’ll bone up a little on the Collective Unconscious….
2 thoughts on “A Place Where We Swim Together”
(Hope I didn’t send this earlier)
The Dark Night of the Soul: Understanding Amidst the Absence of Meaning
Have you ever felt alone in a meaningless universe, unable to bear going through the motions, having no sense of direction, and feeling like you have lost all hope? You could be going through a Dark Night of the Soul.
The purpose of this article is to shed light on this deeply miserable process of growth to come out the other side a more conscious and mature individual.
The dark night of the soul is a stage in personal development when a person undergoes a difficult and significant transition to a deeper perception of life and their place in it. This enhanced awareness is accompanied by a painful shedding of previous conceptual frameworks such as an identity, relationship, career, habit or belief system that previously allowed them to construct meaning in their life.
The dark night of the soul might sound unfamiliar, but it has various relative conceptions in religion, mythology, and psychology. Some commonly associated conditions like ‘existential crisis’ and forms of depression are more recognizable.
Other related concepts include ‘Positive Disintegration’ in psychology, ‘Soul Loss’ or the ‘Descent to the Underworld’ in Shamanism, ‘Katabasis’ in Greek mythology, and ‘Nigredo’ — as Carl Jung symbolically understood it in Alchemy.
The ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ aka ‘Oscura Noche’ however references the name given retroactively to an untitled poem by the 16th century Roman Catholic priest and mystic; St. John of the Cross, where he describes the anguish of the separation of an individual’s soul from God while imprisoned for his unconventional religious beliefs.
So what does the dark night of the soul mean?
The ‘dark night’ symbolizes an obscuration, and ‘soul’ usually refers to an individual’s true essence. In other words: the dark night of the soul is the obscuration of the true self. The obscuration may consist of a previous idea of what one believes about themselves or the world that is thrown into question.
“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”― Hazrat Inayat Khan
As we grow through different stages of life, we are influenced by many aspects of our surroundings. From birth, the family impresses upon a child a name, what the family believes, and what is acceptable and unacceptable.
The education system further influences the child. In high school the adolescent seeks the acceptance of the community as well as internalizes or rejects its values, at work there is a role to play and at home, many switch on the news or attend social gatherings where the topics of conversation can jump between media, the economy, or the failures and successes of their peers.
Personal goals may be the goals of everyone else: to have nice clothes, a fancy car, a comfortable home, an attractive partner, and so on, without a thought of the why, what, or how of their personal existence.
To a person who has bought into the regular motions of modern society, life can seem like it is on autopilot; guided by the ego and habit based on arbitrary and subjective conditioning from the surrounding culture.
However, for many, there is a rude awakening. It could be a tragedy, an experience of a non-ordinary state of consciousness, a person’s “faith flickers” as Ram Dass puts it, a loss of a sense of objectivity, distrust in authority, an accident, career change, illness or realization that you don’t know who you really are or what you want to do in your life — or maybe you have everything you ever wanted and you are still unhappy. Ultimately something shakes you out of your day-to-day limited perception of life.
“The only way we can really approach this is to realize that when we have received the full conditioning of our society and have attained physical maturity that perhaps we will be able to pause for a moment and try to find out a little more about ourselves. Usually however, this moment of pause only comes when physical or emotional reverses break down the structure of the so-called physical-material-industrial plan for living.
Nearly always a crisis, a great disappointment, a heartache, a desperate illness. These are the kinds of pressures that perhaps have been placed here to remind us that we have an individual existence and that this existence must be given expression or the life we are living will remain incomplete.”
― Manly Hall
During the dark night of the soul, a person can struggle with their sense of meaning in the world. Everything can seem purposeless and it seems that there is no place where they belong.
It is quite easy to reluctantly succumb to a despondent nihilism as one floats in liminal space, a kind of purgatory. The allure of victimhood, comfort, and avoidance of responsibility dwell in this place but it comes with the cost of misery… but at least it’s familiar.
It’s no wonder people choose this option because unfortunately there is not much refuge for this in the fast-paced modern world, which can cause the pressure to outweigh a person’s capacity — a threshold where the dark night of the soul can go from emergence to emergency, with accompanying suicidal thoughts or apocalyptic hallucinations of death and destruction in extreme cases.
There are usually intense feelings of sadness, frustration, hopelessness, meaninglessness, and hiraeth — a homesickness for a place that never was.
“We rarely find people who achieve great things without first going astray.”
― Meister Eckhart
How Long Does the Dark Night of the Soul Last?
To take ‘night’ literally would be a mistake. As with any spiritual crisis it is highly idiosyncratic. There is no predetermined time, no ‘normal’ experience as it depends upon each individual.
This night is more like a polar night, where due to the earth’s tilt (life conditions), the area is in darkness much longer than the regular night and day (happiness and sadness) the rest of the world (the person) is used to. This experience, however, as miserable as it may seem, hides extraordinary potential. Patience is essential as any attempt to forcefully speed up the process will inevitably hinder it.
You can put off the dark night of the soul in a world that can cater to your every sense with addictive pleasure, or engage in over-analysis, but the beginning of a way out of this dreary underworld is to be conscious where you were once naïve, as well as letting go of the old parts of you that were conditioned, assumed, or habitual that really isn’t in alignment with who you are. This usually must be accompanied by personal realization that can only come through contemplation, meditation, and relaxation.
Proper contemplation must occur in the context of radical honesty. You can no longer lie to yourself about how you feel or tell yourself how you should feel; meditation helps with the distractions and illusions of the mind; relaxation is required because tension will not reveal how you feel, only that you are refusing to feel.
Relaxation will allow openness and surrender — without these things the pressure of trying to figure everything out simply with tireless thought can easily burn you out, make you feel even more hopeless and fill you up with a sense of dread and overwhelm.
The dark night of the soul can convince you that it’s just because you aren’t doing enough. Your peers certainly might enforce this idea. They don’t understand that there are feelings you need to feel and hang-ups you need to overcome in order to be functional again. Whipping yourself into submission won’t work as the mental pressure you are already under will fast lead to burnout. One thing to remember here is that for now, you don’t need to ‘be more’, you need to ‘be’ more. You need to be able to switch off from everything external and come back to the basic experience of you being alive in the present moment.
The hardest part of the dark night of the soul is to face your shadow which contains the repressed parts of yourself such as your fears, desires, traumas, and beliefs. Behind the dark night of the soul is the treasure of the underworld. It is guarded by a dragon, but you must go into the belly of this beast. If you turn away it will slowly devour you.
Because this is very difficult, there is a risk. One of the greater risks is to adopt an extreme ideology or another pathological complex. Instead of breaking boundaries within yourself, you strengthen them and try to tear down boundaries in the physical world.
There are many enticing pre-packaged ideologies for sale. From religious dogma, conspiracy fanaticism or extreme activism, these are propelled forward by perverting the course of suffering.
It is only natural for someone to seek wisdom in this time of suffering and it is helpful in breaking down previous ideas, but these groups allure people with their half-truths and lead down a path of misguided agenda. The same trap that is a common cause of the dark night of the soul — a misplaced identity.
Understanding the process you are going through and that you are not alone is a great first step in finding some fragments of meaning to hold onto again. Once a small amount of meaning returns it will then give hope, in turn affecting the frustration and sadness, introducing a sense of feeling more at ease in the process.
Whatever a person’s natural temperament, there is an interpretation that can allow them to start to draw meaning from this experience to see the light at the end of the tunnel, from the ‘darkest before the dawn’.
The situation resolves itself in the event of the reintegration of perception beyond the original conditioning of the individual. Some events may make things click and awaken this sleeper within, or possibly a full retreat inside with no external stimulation is required. The conditioning one has received if it were to be analyzed piece by piece can take more than a lifetime to deconstruct on the level of mind, but fortunately, the change needs to take place at the fundamental level of perception. Time must be spent on this fundamental level.
During this experience meditation and quietude will be a helpful practice to meet life at a level beyond the noise and chaos of the fractured mind. More and more you will start to see the world as it is, rather than what you were taught, or what you would prefer it to be. From a place of calm, you can be honest enough with yourself to rebuild your life in accordance with who you are, or aspire to be. Guidance from someone who has made this journey can also be invaluable.
Thank you for your incisive comments. Always impressed by your erudition. I’m familiar with “ego death” through readings of spiritual teachers. One of the more convincing journeys being that of Bernadette Roberts in her The Experience of no self. When the self falls away there is anguish followed by if you accept it a state of enlightenment. I’m not quite there yet. I’m waiting for my food stamps and social security hardship bonus payments to kick in… Live off the government for a spell before the zombies migrate across the gg bridge.