The View From the Bottom

       I know that over the years I've given a lot of people the idea that it was the failure of my marriage that caused my battle with depression. Truth is I was having problems long before that.

     Looking back, I feel that it was because I had slipped through the bottleneck of the hourglass and my perspective changed from that of someone sitting atop the other grains of sand looking down and switched to someone looking up from the bottom. It is the existential fate of the human race that people who are observant of what it's going on around them, will inevitably reach the point in life where they, in spite of all their optimism, will start to not only view the glass as being half empty but to also began to question the thirst of person holding the glass.

       I don't believe that my wife leaving me was the source of my problems, but rather it was the change in my perspective that has created most of the problems that have plagued me since.

        The flooring fell out from beneath me and put me into a basement I didn't know even existed. That's the problem with thinking that a big pile of sand contained within a small hourglass will support your weight forever. I fell victim to one of Christ's most prescient warnings; not to build your house on foundations of sand.

       The true problem was in my lack of a spiritual upbringing. I rejected the teachings of the Church fairly early in my life, or at least, in how they were being taught by people who no more knew what they were saying than I did. The thing was, I didn't replace them right away with anything of lasting value. Nietzsche said that if humans kill off God, we would quickly fill the void with mud, rocks, feathers, sticks, and money. In my case, the material world  offered up the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, an ample supply of drugs, and a lot of suddenly sexually liberated females. Being young and foolish, and believing that these things were approved by most of my peers, I foolishly latched on to them in order to medicate  wounds I wasn't even aware were causing me to bleed.

          It's hard to rebuild a house from the basement up. You don't know if you need to roof or replace the flooring. I needed to go in search of new building materials, materials that would hold up while the ground shook all around me. I went to therapy for about a year, I read lots of books and I thought about shit all the damn time. Existentialist thought is like that, it is a fundamental search for meaning that no longer allows you to drink six beers and watch a football game to make it go away.

        The first time you wake up in the morning having the existential debate over why you should bother getting out of bed, it will never, ever really leave you. You can put it in the closet for minute or two, shove it under the bed, place it on the backburner, or hang Christmas ornaments on it, but it's like that annoying friend/relative  that you don't really want to talk to, but who texts you every ten minutes.

          Another problem is that you can't escape noticing all of the machinations, twists and turns, and outright blathering of everyone around you trying to capture more than their fair share of moments of happiness where they don't have to think about life's inevitable outcome. You become something of a pariah in a tinfoil hat,  someone many seek to avoid.

            "Don't take my games away. Leave my movies alone; my music brings me great joy!" they scream in unison while their games become their passion, their movies turn to indoctrination, and their music can debases and but seldom ever uplifts. Their eyes plead, "Don't make me aware of all this; I don't need no self awareness; I get up in the morning because I love bacon and eggs and coffee." There's nothing wrong with bacon, eggs and coffee in the morning, all these things would serve very well if we have built solid foundations and a decent framework on which to construct our reality.

             I've been searching for some substitute flooring for an awful long time, and everytime I turn around, life gives me something else to worry about. All I know is that I can't have the Big Bad Wolf blowing my shit over for the fucking third time. I urgently need to lay my hands on some brick and mortar.

           This morning, I found a diamond in the coal mine though, a passage I read made of something far more substantial than the typical cotton candy floor tiles offered up by the dipshits  currently in charge of of us at this moment in time.

            It says something to the effect of, "Culture should always be the expression of awe at the immediate presence of the sacred, involving the whole being of the self and regarded in the light of lived experience that begins with the arrival of "primal appearances" where the world is shown as a "plenitude of divine configurations". In other words, knowing that all of creation is divinely configured and that we humans don't invent meaning, meaning is revealed to us.

          It went on to say that if we can avoid looking at culture as only an external manifestation, and take the phenomenon of sacrifice more seriously, we can realize that culture should originate in revelations so powerful and pervasive that they compel a community's devotion."

            Let me ask you a question, when was the last time that our culture has revealed anything other than someone's egotistical desire to profit in money, power,  slavish devotion, or the mixture of all three?