Breaking The Pattern

[Nefastos]

Reminded me of a time when we were visiting your place in Lappeenranta with SoA brothers over a decade ago. Everyone was already almost asleep but I couldn't sleep yet, as you were hovering over the apartment and did your evening prayers. When you left the altar, I witnessed you turning into the pyramid head of Silent Hill for a moment.

Yes, I remember that; we discussed the event later in our correspondence. Jung would undoubtedly have a lot to say about the basically positive symbol of the upward pointing triangle becoming a executioner's hood. Things that are well & good in the archetypal world can become exceedingly dangerous when our human life touches their ultimately merciless mysteries. Like Ave just wrote in the Finnish part discussion about November spirituality: "For the gods and spirits are in the end not like our stories about gods and spirits, but something that surpasses those stories. Terrifying."

robed fratres were performing some kind of meeting at the children's playground.

But I think fluctuating between patterns: making them, breaking them, can be seen as playful way of experiencing life.

Indeed...

[Benemal]

If I do not take my coffee at 18:30 sharp, having or not having coffee stops having a positive impact on my life, since if I could drink coffee any time I want, I would only drink coffee, and very soon receive zero happiness from it.

Exact reversal, of how I am. I enjoy doing it, whenever it feels like it's time for another mug of coffee, even at night, then it's is happy thing. No order, or maybe no rules is my order. I don't know what you mean by "if I could drink coffee any time I want, I would only drink coffee". Does that mean you couldn't stop, because of addiction?

[Nefastos]

Does that mean you couldn't stop, because of addiction?

No, not like that, it's a bit different. But I doubt it can be explained briefly.

I have a constant feeling of exploding from inner energy. Not an ADHD type or something that could be easily turned to sports activities, but different. This inner burning is like an unstoppable element that must be constantly managed so it does not turn from constructive to destructive. Any kind of elemental force in human culture would be a valid analogy: a flooding stream that can fertilize the fields but also drown the hole village, a slash-and-burn cultivation that burns down the whole forest unless guarded, or even a nuclear plant that will level the city in case of disturbance. All these things are in need of constant managing, because if the elemental force is just "let flow its course", it will destroy everything. This bears strong resemblance to basic neurotic pattern, but the difference is that the fire passing through the nervous system is not a phantasm of fear, but semisubstantial.

Naturally, this basic feeling brings with it many (positive things and) difficulties. The difference between the rhythm I would feel natural and the one that would be natural more objectively are very different things. This is my life as a hummingbird. I can flap my wings eighty times per second & do something positive with that, but if I start to consume coffee with my "natural rhythm" at eighty cups per second, that will result in a disaster.

Thus also in my spare time hobbies I tend to install "extra weights" to keep things going more slowly. It might be too lengthy to give an example here. But we see that in this kind of bending the flow of energy to keep it from bursting, patterns become extremely important. They are like the arbitrary self-constructed laws for the mafia of my head. And like with the real mafia, one important law of my inner mafia is: do not let the others see that you do not actually play by their rules. (And now I must remind that we speak of rules and not ethics. Rules are meaningless, ethics are everything.)

[Polyhymnia]

I have a constant feeling of exploding from inner energy. Not an ADHD type or something that could be easily turned to sports activities, but different. This inner burning is like an unstoppable element that must be constantly managed so it does not turn from constructive to destructive.

I have this constant feeling, too. A business colleague once told me that he and I were afflicted with the same temperament, that it seemed we both needed to output at high levels. He called it being, 'a vessel of creation' and I found it quite suiting. In my mundane life I am constantly adding to my plate of things I want to accomplish, and if that plate lessens even a little, I have a tendency to find even more things to pile on. Stillness makes me uncomfortable (working on it) and I often struggle with the idea of down time. I had to see a psychiatrist a couple of years ago, and she diagnosed me with ADHD, but I didn't take it to heart because I can often control my impulses, and I didn't want to go on medication. That line between constructive to destructive is oh so fine, and I rely on constant creativity and motion to help keep me on the constructive side.

[Insanus]

How it's actually done is a mystery to me. Change feels like you try and try and nothing works ever and then you just notice the change actually already happened some eight months ago and things just flow differently for no reason. I guess it happens when imagination acts on the subconscious and a new normal is established as a standard state of mind or something like that, but why and how exactly? It's kinda like those zen stories where some guy just goes to a grocery store and bam he is enlightened. Really intriguing and difficult question.