I don't think most people have any idea what I've been through, or what I'm talking about when I describe the bleakness of depression, the terror of panic, or the stratospheric thrill of creation and discovery.
When I am feeling toughminded and emotionally infragile - when I am on my medications - life is almost appallingly superficial. It is easy to float along and navigate the stream without too much trouble. On the other hand, everything seems so much richer when I am off them, both positively and negatively. I feel that most people have no idea how extraordinarily rich an experience life can be. For some reason our minds seem to only be able to function usefully when the intensity of that experience is toned down to a certain level. Otherwise, you get overwhelmed and cease to be able to make meaningful choices in the face of so much information. Almost anything becomes a valid point of view, a launching spot for deeper investigation, and soon it all gets to be too much and the mind just shuts down, or else careers off into a panic.
I find it abhorrent to have to filter the world's amazing richness through so many layers of gauze, like an audiophile decrying his favorite concerto rasped from speakers which can only reproduce a limited range of frequencies, and which significantly color the sound of those that do come through. I believe this is why artists of all stripes walk a fine line between discovery and madness. Ordinary people have no idea what they're missing, so they carry on with their lives in relative contentment. It's hard for me to be content with such a state, knowing as I do what is possible, and yet I don't want the destabilizing vertigo that comes with the full experience.
1 comment:
I think that's exactly the struggle the buddhist 'doctrine' is spawned from. upon seeing the endless spectrum of ever-changing emotion and substance, one is left with a decision. to cut oneself off from those things that make life worth living as well as those that are terrifying, one will drive themselves mad or to death. but to realize that the mind itself, terrified of that which it cannot control or categorize, is also ever-changing, and to thereby relegate that mind secondary to consciousness (waking life, whatever you want to call it), one can exist within the full range of human experience without fear. Not that it's that simple of course, nor am i a sage. But i have experienced this firsthand on a couple of occasions, and i believe profoundly that it is true. It is the only existential argument I've ever heard that holds up under logical scrutiny but which transcends logic in it's simplicity.
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