Renewal Thirteen : The Hamster Wheel of Our Existence

Realization is a wonderful balm—for a while. Yesterday it was cathartic, today it doesn’t help.

One of the most common human behaviors is our internal dialogue. We create stories in our head and soon our bodies are affected, which then feeds back to the stories in our head. Or, we can begin the internal dialogue to explain our affected bodies, and create that feedback loop. It is like the relationship between hallucinations and delusions in schizophrenia–if one is hallucinating, one can become delusional attempting to organize and rationalize the hallucinations.

So I woke up in the middle of the night, which has been the pattern lately, and began running the internal dialogue–not deliberately, just automatically. I mean, I’ve got all of this stuff, and it needs maintenance, and it needs attention. And isn’t it a part of the package that when we need to deal with something, we must ruminate about it? After all, how else are we supposed to organize all of the events in our lives into a cohesive pattern?

Okay, maybe there’s an easier way. Still, patterns are easier to see, once formed they do not require the energy of seeing and dealing with minutiae. A curious cat not used to being in a moving car will try to apprehend every line in the middle of the highway, driving itself nuts in the process. To relax and be at peace, the cat must let go of the lines whizzing by.

Those lines whizzing by are our internal dialogue. That dialogue seems to formulate and reformulate the organizational window out of which we view the world which appears to be passing by. Yet, unlike the cat in the moving car, we may be creating the entire scene. I mean, is there really that scene? Does that scene lie outside of ourselves? Or have we created the car and the road and the lines and busied ourselves with trying to understand all that we see?

More ruminating, more dialogue, more lines, more body reacting negatively or positively.

So is birthed the idea that it just has to be one thing or another.

What does it matter? The meaning of life is an inappropriate question for us to ask. It is, instead, a question that is being asked of us.

Landing on one thing or another is simply a way of establishing polarities, the boundaries of experience. Sometimes we make the mistake that the perception of one thing or another is a cognitive enterprise that has discovered the boundaries rather than having created them.
More balm, more ruminating, more explanation, more tape loops. The damn thing just won’t shut up.

More than 30 years ago I became well by noticing, but ignoring the internal dialogue. That was and is a bumpy road. That dialogue is chattering away and I simply let it chatter. But that has caught up with me simply because I’m tired of it. Recent events have found the flaws in that strategy.

Realization is an organizational peak. Then what? Do it again? Very orgasmic, and very much the hamster wheel of our existence.

Amidst the noise of our present existence, silence awaits, loudly announcing the most appropriate place to begin creating anew.