I’ve managed to cram the year’s teaching experience I was supposed to have for this job into a month or two, and learn AP literature and history to passable levels at the same time. Everything from scratch, plus a complete deepsock overscope during my prep period. There were a couple of near all-nighters but I put that to bed with improved productivity paradigms. I find it exhilirating to work at a pace where minutes and seconds count.
The job has me reading teaching early vanilla American history and the Dark Enlightenment interpretation of modern America at the same time. Reading Beard’s description of America’s post-civil war industrialization hit me like a blow to the gut. I put two and two together and saw that the American economic engine was fucked beyond repair – there was no hope of enjoying those glory days again on American soil. The toxin had spread through every capillary of the system, at least to levels sufficient to deter me from entry. I hate and despise the American monoculture – I am well past its Overton-window bifurcation, it is all toxic to me. That is why I had to leave. There is literally nothing for me there except the pitch-perfect reception of cultural anathema in my native-born ear, 24/7.
Which leaves where? The ‘net and the Sino-Russosphere, emphasis on the former, because you can’t beat a liberalizing Asian tiger for growth. Marry into the fringe islet of Hong Kong and I’m set, operating as an interface between declining developed West and burgeoning East – sufficiently beyond the reach of the Cathedral’s din that I can be safely outside its Overton Window, express my natural contempt, and choose my associations without crippling career impairment.
The experience of working at maximum capacity, with periodic hard deadlines, in a subject that is engaging and infinite, has been very worthwhile. The PowerDoro I think I should rechristen to the HIIperDoro – High Intensity Interval Pomodoro. Better fits what it is.
It seems that productivity was a crucial element in my quest to achieve psychological stability. The standard advice I’d get is, “Just relax, man.” Can’t do it. Regardless of result, my conscience will excoriate me if at any moment I fail to give my all, within biological and emotional limits, for the Kingdom. The combination of deepsocket and fully developed Christian faith admit no compromise there. I can no more change one than the other. So the only way to relax was to max myself out to the satisfaction of my own demanding standards. All prior attempts to “chill” amounted to temporarily caging my spirit in some meditative or PUA-ish state box, where it inevitably screamed bloody murder until back in control.
Only when a leisure activity is fully approved under the self-maxout plan can I permit myself to indulge without this screaming outrage drowning all normal emotional response.
Coupled with deepsock scope creep, this has naturally resulted in massive cycles of overwork, burnout, depression, inefficiency, having no life, etc.
Funny thing is, I don’t actually want a life. I just want to max out. At the end of the day, I am what I am.
But there remains the problem of taking pleasure – namely, how to do it? The prerequisite I’ve explained above; recognizing it as an unalterable prerequisite was the necessary first step.
Only afterwards can I think about Game and the pleasanter aspects of meditation: savoring, gratitude, state, chilling, love, etc. These things are simply not compatible with an angry gorilla rampaging through my skull.
This in fact explains much of my emotional brutality: the brutalized are brutal. But enough of that.
So I was puzzling on what my core meditation should be. I.e., the steady state, always on meditation. The rest is peripheral, situational, specific, occasional. The steady state is simply your mind, all the time.
It must therefore be quite lightweight. Add much overhead, either emotional or intellectual, and you cripple your ability to psychologically engage with the present, and to both process and respond congruently to the full range of human experience.
From the above paragraph it’s obvious that anything involving shadings of happiness or sadness is right out. That would be ridiculously one-dimensional.
But without any shading whatsoever, the meditation vanishes to nothing, which is the same as not meditating. So what’s allowed?
My solution is:
TT
cc
HD
TT stands for targeted tongues. This replaces left brain rational worrying/analysis knee-jerk loop with a right brain glossolalia that reports the problem/issue to God.
In the past I experimented with doing tongues in the inner monologue all the time. This was far too much overhead. Now I just use it to hijack and interrupt any left brain potentially harmful left brain thoughtstream.
cc stands for corpus callosum. That is the connective brain tissue between the left and right hemispheres that enables them to talk to each other. Sever it and you have something bizarre, perhaps approximating two people living in one body. A mess I don’t want to think about. Anyhow masculinization reduces inter-hemisphere communication, creating a susceptibility to unresolved hemispheric divergence, which creates major emotional processing problems. cc is my centering meditation to keep the hemispheres in sync. It involves a certain centering, focus, or integration. An inner line or plane down the bilateral axis of symmetry is felt, mostly in the skull. In some ways it’s similar to the third eye. I find it hard to explain it more clearly than that.
HD stands for HiiperDoro, which I defined in my last post. This impels to right action, at maximum compressin, therefore maximum capacity. Not that this implies freneticism, since often cadence and pacing are called for. Rather, it is maximization of value for time.
The absence of emotional breaches due to gorilla activity or hemispheric imbalance, combined with the full focus of cc and HD, finally give me the emotional continence to practice tight Game that isn’t merely founded on my general deepsock indifference.
Inevitably there is a shading to this meditation, but it is a mild and acceptable one. It merely implies focus. If I am defocused, I am not meditating anyway. It is only when my brain revs up to “deal with a problem”, or when I am at high attention due to good biological energy, that I need to use this. Thus it gracefull degrades, another crucial requirement of a permanent meditation. If nothing else, one must sleep, with all the of stages of reducing deliberate psychological control that entails.
Having a solid core meditation permits one to activate and deactivate peripheral koans appropriately, making one neither dependent on them nor too weak to examine them frankly.
I find all of my second tier koans important, but the latest I want to mention is savor. Having now the capacity to enjoy the moment, I find it important to do so lest the intensity of my commitment to compression and maxout wane like the strength of an overtaxed muscle short on oxygen.