Square One

A place I didn’t want to return to

I really didn’t want to return to not knowing anything… but we wind back the cogs to a place like that more often than is desired.

It’s hard to simply sit with things again, & disregard the constant whip being cracked in the back of the skull…

I am having a hard time even recollecting memories or things I once knew when given the chance to ponder life in meaningful ways.

It’s the reason I’ve been offline by a large percentage, really. I spent the last month playing a card game competitively & became a Division Five Platinum Ranked league player, because it was easier than having to take roll-call upstairs on all the shit I had just undergone over the last half year & continuing onward.

I don’t usually like writing this way. Its always felt weird…

“TMI” is the vibe I give off to myself, like there should be something more interesting to debut. I just have had, quite literally, no brain power left anymore for all the aspirations & big ideas.

It’s all gone. Somewhere.

My beloved says I had a “Tower Moment”, like the major arcana in Tarot, & perhaps that’s more true than previously thought.

I explained the Tower of Babel to my kids recently & they were persistently curious why the language became “confounded” for the builders. My reply was a bit more esoteric than the simple answer that the story implies, but it held my thought on a point I had needed answered, long enough to produce a response here.

It may help someone feeling stuck, who is in a rut, constantly sluggish, or just in a perpetually vegetative paralysis like me. The findings begin here.

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The Tower of Babel is a simplification to contextualize psychological law. The stones are the building blocks of assumptions & accumulations. Humanity gathers facts, identities, ambitions, then relationships, now responsibilities, then explanations of ourselves, then explanations of our explanations.

We transport out of a search for truth & meaning into the architecture of maintenance, & it becomes a subtle tragedy that every acquisition demands stewardship. Every new possession asks that we remember it. Personal social bonds seek to be tended. Each new achievement painstakingly preserved. A soul that used to seek freedom by expanding discovers that now expansion has turned into admin work… hence the Babel principle.

The builders do not fail because they’re evil. They mistake the height for wholeness.

Taking a look into Carl Jung’s perspective, we could say that consciousness is forever attempting to colonize reality. The ego wishes to know, organize, & integrate more, standing higher & seeing farther. Yet there comes an instance where the psyche begins to protest & riot.

The unconscious, which serves balance, introduces confusion where consciousness has become tyrannical. Then “the language” becomes confounded.

It’s not simply spoken language but the hidden language of our goals, self-definition, & the language of certainty being referred to.

The individual who once likely thought they knew exactly who they were, suddenly doesn’t… Those plans lost their urgency, achievements diluted of their merit, & the carefully maintained social structures are now more distant & diametric than ever. What appears to our ego as collapse is likely compensation, instant-rebate, or a stipend of sorts.

The psyche just dismantled a tower that had far exceeded its original foundations.

The Tarot image of the Tower expresses that same mystery. It’s a Tower being struck from above as a symbol that there are dimensions of reality that cannot be reached by accumulation alone. Lightning represents a vertical intervention, coming from levels beyond the ego’s engineering.

One spends years building upward & the lightning bolt arrives in an instant — also a sign of illumination & revelation, embedded in destruction.

That structure is shattered so that what is hidden beneath it is allowed to breathe again, & probably why many people who undergo profound psychic reorganization report paradoxical findings from it.

They know less but feel wiser.

Not as many names remembered, fewer opinions held, & less ambitions possessed.

Yet they feel closer to themselves.

To intellect, it’s processed as loss, but to the soul, such is seen as simplification. Babel’s scattered languages represent fragmentation that occurs when consciousness supersedes its natural carrying capacity. Psyche can no longer maintain a single coherent narrative. The thousand voices that had accumulated through culture, ideology, obligation, & aspiration from birth begin to speak all at once. Then exhaustion arrives.

Now cometh, The Great Forgetting. A place people fear since m ego equates memory with identity, even though there’s a sacred form to forgetfulness — Forests shed leaves, Snakes shed skin, & psyche sheds worlds.

This individual emerges unable to reconstruct every previous version of themself… The point, precisely.

The Self—that deeper organizing center Jung talked on about for so long —isn’t concerned with preserving every construction of the ego. It is interested in preserving life.

It performs a metaphorical defrag. A system reset. A ‘one-squared’, on command. The person may feel as though a civilization has collapsed within them —old priorities dissolving, connections fading, conceptual clutter evaporating

Beneath the ruins, silence is discovered… Astonishing silence. It isn’t emptiness but the language older than the building blocks themselves.

Before systems, doctrines, networks, achievements, and identities came into being, there was simplicity. In the deepest wisdom traditions suggests that what is most essential does not accumulate; it reveals itself when accumulation ceases.

Every tower eventually reaches a height which heaven refuses further construction. This is true for our own progress in life.

Confusion descends. Builders weep. Plans are lost. The dialect once smooth now fragmenting.

The destruction that cyclically happens within us is less about punishment & more of an invitation to stop building upward. Then time to begin descending inward commences.

The hidden prophecy is that true treasures sought at the summit are actually buried beneath our foundation all along.

We just have to free fall into them sometimes.

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This is what the human individual goes through — when the mind is in constant states of acquisition — of gnosis, knowledge, material things, networks, progress — increasing its perpetual motion of maintenance & obligatory action until the body necessitates the mind to do a system reset, where the conscious readouts of information homogenize & then drain out over a period of time (weeks, months or years).

Sometimes they forget a lot of what they knew, friends & connections they used to prize & retain, but their baseline standard is peaceful, calmer waters internally.

So often we widen our gaze to a horizon line that we forget how much of our torque is pulled out from under us. It hits in ways that are felt mentally & physically, as though we have no energy or power to initiate any of our ambitions.

I’ve recognized this collapse as a long overdue emergency shutdown meant to save us from running ragged indefinitely.

The shock of implosion is ten times worse than the feeling of melting into a form not recognizable.

The idea of that kinetic chemistry comparison gave me this image in my head of that overly-utilized metaphor of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, & how the melting in the chrysalis is actually what needs to happen. Everybody wants to be the butterfly. Nobody wants to be the sludge in the sack, for very long, if at all.

My advice is to proportion growth so as not to overextend into hyper-dissipation & atrophy madness. This balancing factor is so often not the strong suit for us as humans, & is the result of a lot of our prevailing problems.

Being okay with the shit-show of absolute meltdown, instead of frantically trying to auto-correct features, has done more in getting me back on track than worrying about current circumstances ever did.

We never want to feel like we’re starting over, or have forgotten all the decades of study, but it’s by design, so that we can reframe our trajectory better.

I’ve grown comfortable with the uncomfortable. For once it’s finally starting to loosen up at the reinstatement of becoming, for the first time in a long time.

Back to front; Square One.

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