7th November 2020
Human beings are born with a Void in their souls - with a terrible, mortal insufficiency – with the Original Sin. We're not complete. We're not perfect. We lack something, be it physical or spiritual. And it actually makes a lot of sense not to be an ideal creature – if we were ideal, we wouldn't have the incentive to strive for any goal, be it survival, reprodcution or something grander.
I wanted to write a bit about my experience with Bipolar Disorder II. This condition makes me experience periods of acute depression and periods of unnaturally elevated mood – hypomania.
What is depression? It is not something fixed, stable, unchanging. It's a gradient of negative emotion ranging from bearable to completely crippling. In times of depression I often felt nothing but the Void we're born with. There was no me. There was no hope, positivity, confidence – nothing of that sort. The only thing left was a gaping hole and a deep hatered towards myself and humanity.
Hypomania is different from mania, which is present in Bipolar Disorder I. Mania makes you lose all contact with reality, while hypomania does it partially. I think that hypomania makes you forget about the Void in your soul. You're finally complete. You're confident, you can forgive yourself, you can try new things and not be afraid of criticism. It just feels awesome, but it has some downsides too. It can lead you to suboptimal decisions, as it's not going to last forever, and if it's gone and the Void is back, you might not be able to feel comfortable with the world you created when hypomaniac.
I'm gonna write a cliche now, but it seems that many people don't understand it yet, at least they act as if they haven't understood it yet. It's important to embrace the Void – to accept the lack and try to act towards a noble goal despite it. It's a dead end to try to get rid of the Void – it's not going anywhere, believe me. You won't fill it with anything.
I saw a webcomic that's just so beautfiul the other day. It's says that people are born with a hole in their chests and they try to fill it with money, objects, ideologies or other people. And one of the characters says that they've decided to let the hole be, because they've discovered that if they run against the wind, it makes a funny whistling sound.
That's beautiful. If more of humans understood that, the world would be a different place. It doesn't seem to be such a complex idea, but it looks like the Void is being weaponized to make us buy things that we don't need and support politicians we don't actually trust and so on. Just think about the freedom the acceptance of your insufficiencies gives you – you're free not to buy things you don't need. You're free not to pursue numbing pleasures that are destructive in the long term. You're free not to be dependent on people that don't want the best for you. You're free not to cling to ideologies that like parasites feed on your wounds. You're free not to pursue spiritual enlightenment, as you've already attained it.
You will never accept yourself completely and love yourself without any caveats. That's a utopian idea. You will always have regrets, bad memories, worse days, unpleasant encounters, problems. So what? Why get rid of that? Why get rid of the motivation to do things? That's part of life, and as long as it doesn't cripple you to go on, what's the problem with that? What do you want to become? The Enlightened Buddha, free from the mortal problems of all beings? Well, let me tell you something that you can believe or not, but what Buddha understood, is that there is no enlightenment.
There is no escape from the cycle of deaths and rebirths. It doesn't mean becoming a frog after death, but as Jordan Peterson explains it, it's the death-destruction of a once insufficient worldview, that inhabited your soul. Once your idea of the world stops being sufficient, you experience chaos – that's the death. You no longer know who you are and what your goal should be. But after that comes the rebirth – you update your mental structure and are ready to go.
You will never escape that, because you will never completely understand an infinite, changing cosmos. Buddha found that out – there just doesn't exist one piece of information that will be always valid and will solve all your problems. That's also reiterated in the beginning line of the Taoist Daodejing –The Way that can be told of is not the eternal Way – there's no eternal, always valid solution to the human condition. As soon as you understand that, you will be free, as the ordinary world, the ordinary human mind is the highest level of enlightenment.
Let me try to prove it. Let's assume that you're an all-powerful being. Okay, you can create anything you want, there's absolutely no bounds to the possibilities of your creation. You can create the best conditions for yourself. You can create a state of endless ecstasy. What do you create? Do you create a world where you can get high on heroin all the time, and that' all there is? It might be pleasant for some time, but for eternity? I don't know. Doesn't seem so.
Let me tell you what I would do, if I were an all-powerfull being. I would create an infinite, complex, coherent world that's constantly changing and is never stale. Then, I would turn myself into a million different creatures and make them strive, fight, cooperate, compete and act towards their goals. I would turn myself into creatures, that would try to understad what I was and what my goals where. I would arrange things in such a way, that there always would be a secret to discover, a goal to attain, a person to meet, a responsibility to take and a pleasure to experience. I would make some people act against others, so that I don't have it too easy.
Freedom is knowing that you will never be free. We can't be absolutely free, because absolute freedom implies that we're not even bound by a stable identity, time or space. It's ilustrated extremely well in the 26th episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, where Shinji is being explained why humans are separated, insufficient creatures that experience a lack. In a world of freedom, there's not even a being that could experience it, as everyone is everyone else all the time and never. There's no time and space, as they would restrict your freedom – you're not free to fly, if you have to stand firmly on the ground, but that restriction allows you to actually choose were to walk. The restriction of one freedom opens up the possibility of other freedoms.
Hideki Anno – the creator of this anime understood what freedom was. And so did Shinji, the protagonist. He accepted that he will always be insufficient and he has chosen for the flawed, imperfect, insufficient world to exist, rather than destroying it and merging all human souls into one complete being, that's devoid of a goal to strive for.
Omedetou, Shinji-kun!
dd
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