Background Judgement
I just listened to an episode of the podcast “A Millenial’s Guide to Saving the World” called You Can't Rush Your Healing: A Hero's Journey.
There was a lot here but the rant at the end felt like something everyone my age needs to hear.
Our world is in our hands. There are problems of violence and destruction out in the world, against people and the whole of nature. They feel too big to solve, but most of us carry around an awareness of them, somewhere in our being, at all times. At the same time, there’s a mental violence at play that I’m still trying to put my finger on.
By the end of my time on the road, I felt all anxiety had vanished. I knew I had the power and ability to live my life, make great choices, and enjoy my time. Confidence so pure it didn’t even feel like confidence. There was no addition to my experience, only the absolute subtraction of doubt. There was just nothing that could worry me.
I experienced this on my trip from California to Rhode Island as well. It manifested in the easiness I felt being around people. I rolled into Chicago, immediately got high as shit, and just cruised.
This is not the norm for me. Often I am in my head, speculating about all the ways the person I’m interacting with must be judging me. This happens at different scales at different times, and is rarely paralyzing, but it’s still there, nagging.
And once I got back to cities, civilization, where I had an established life, I noticed a certain stress start to creep back up.
Chris Ryan always talks about a study that found that schizophrenic people in other cultures also hear voices, but the voices are saying different things.
From this article on the study:
“In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign”
What’s manifesting as a full-fledged voice in the experience of a schizophrenic person comes into our experience as things we tell ourselves silently everyday. I’m not sure why. It’s maybe coming from some ideas that have evolved over generations into a deeply rooted pattern by tribal enforcement.
Ideas are best defeated by better ideas. The message I took away from this podcast was that we have to start playing an active role in coming up with the better ideas, building a community around them, and spreading the best ideas and community outward.
Obviously it’s ok for different people to have different ideas. But to me, there are objective ideas that are making life worse for everyone. Like this pervasive judgment. Acceptance and openness are virtues. Through them we can get to know the experience of others. And seeing the world from more angles only enhances the experience of being alive in it.
Song: Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd. I heard this song in a new way recently. That the inner experience you have as a human is so rich that it would be impossible to ever communicate enough to have someone really share it with you, but personally something inside me really wants to feel like it’s been shared, like what I’ve experienced has been experienced by the people I know. I wish you were here, inside my head, but at the end of the day we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year…