Opiate Intolerance
Nov. 11th, 2025 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamingwithfairiesI'm irritated today.
Not restless, not impatient. Just annoyed.
And the reason is rather unusual.
Last night before sleep I wanted to reflect on my spiritual path. I was thinking about whether I should spend some time re-evaluating what I've been through, what I believed in and why, what truths I was avoiding, what fears I was hiding from. Or whether I should simply move on ahead, throw my spiritual baggage in the trash and start over on a blank slate.
Why does it matter?
Spirituality has been a thematic or basically essential part of my life since I was a child. Neutrality or moral chaos is a recent development since I exhausted all paths that could possibly mean anything to me or have any use to me.
How do I reconcile or let go of something that's been so fundamental to the development of my psyche?
It's not that I yearn for some kind of meaning, truth or belonging or for someone to tell me how to live or what to believe in - I am fundamentally opposed to all that. If anything, I've been seeking a sense of "alignment" more than anything, but also a sense of curiosity. The same reason I enjoy reading philosophy and psychology, spirituality is another lens through which I can view humanity.
But there is also a frustrating sense that I don't "fit" - my morals are chaotic, my beliefs are all over the place, I highly value empirical evidence but I leave room for subjective interpretations of reality. Synchronicities are real, sometimes things are just too uncanny to be dismissed as coincidence.
I keep trying to figure out if there's some logic I'm missing. If there's a misconception I have of myself or of my interpretation. Thankfully, I'm nowhere near the self-doubting delusional levels I used to be in ten years ago. But there's still always this quietly anxious sense that I can't quite trust my perception of reality sometimes. Like at any moment I might trip over myself. It's not surprising, given how many times I've betrayed myself for nothing, as Dostoyevsky would say. Building trust in my own perception is a tricky process. But this is where intuition or gut instinct comes in. It gets obscured and confused when the mind is allowed to go crazy. After all, how can you tell when you're having a bad vibe about someone because there's really something suspicious about them or whether you're just paranoid? I feel so disjointed just thinking about it, but I've made it this far in life, I can't be that bad at judging people and situations, right?
There are many senses vying for attention. Logic, emotion, intuition, instinct, belief, opinion, external sources... Faith or hope is meant to be louder or steadier than all of these things. Faith is trust despite lack of evidence. Loyalty despite doubt. This is a test that spirituality puts people through but also the thing that traps them. However, ultimately, I think it's a choice. What we believe in makes us safe, and we may choose comfort above psychologically uncomfortable truth or risk it with the unknown. I can choose too. I know what I want, how I want it. But what of my fears? What of the truth?
My problem is I want the benefits of spiritual faith but I am unable to give up self-integrity. Various occult traditions, perhaps most notably Fraternitas Saturnii and Satanism, offer both externalised power and self-knowledge. But then I run into another dilemma. My empathy, or what I believe to be empathy. I look at the world and I wonder if pursuing more selfish aims is really the right thing to do. But as I sit here and type this, I can't see an alternative. To choose a right hand path is to deny my truth. The fact that in my core I am wicked. I'm only angelic and loving to the chosen ones, who more often than not have some karmic tie to me. History preceding this life. A sense of deep familiarity. Like old flames, old friends, old family. Connections that defy norm or the usual way relationships are built between people.
I don't discard everything. At this point, all I can really trust with regard to these things is my own intuition, my own gut of what feels correct. Even me saying things like "karmic ties" that's not a belief. I don't choose to believe in reincarnation. In fact, I have no belief around it and am quite sceptical of anyone who claims to know or remember another life. But there is something in my gut, deep beyond logic or emotion or opinion. It just feels right, it aligns with some internal logic that's beyond explanation. I've always felt this way about reincarnation. It makes sense to me that energy would be recycled or transfigured. Like water evaporating from a vessel, then going to gather itself into something else. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it merely changes form or is conserved. That's the first law of thermodynamics.
Maybe the truth is that I don't understand myself enough and spirituality will never help me in that regard, at least not at this stage of my life. I am more interested in philosophy. Maybe psychology, to an extent, although I have a love-hate thing going on with Carl Jung. He has some brilliant and genuinely helpful ideas, but he can also be insufferable and ignorant as hell. A product of his time, perhaps, or maybe I just feel that way because I read a book of his that naturally invites that sort of reaction. He was weird about spiritual faith as well. Unable to believe in God but obsessed with trying to do so anyway, even if it meant dabbling in Gnosticism. He believed humanity will go insane without religion and that a secular or atheistic society would be disastrous to the psychological development of our species. Jordan Peterson spouts the same nonsense about the importance of "the narrative" even in the face of religious abuse, lies, wars, and egregious ignorance for science and basic logic. Religion and spirituality has caused nothing but grief. And before the reader jumps in with a "BUT COMMUNISM" it was literally designed as a replacement for religion, not emancipation from it. Marx no more believed "the masses" could survive without faith in a higher power/order than Jung.
But I've digressed enough.
Ultimately, I think that I need to reframe my spirituality. Move away from esoteric and occult. Not to avoid it, but neither to give more meaning than it's worth. I've been reading about the Hindu goddess Kali and also Nietzsche, so I think I ought to continue. Kali is a fascinating goddess, especially for a culture that places so little respect in women - the country with highest statistics of rape on the planet worships the fierce goddess Kali as their spiritual mother... Meanwhile Nietzsche is just a fun guy, his thoughts are satisfying to read and make sense to me. No use forcing spiritual faith on myself like Jung. It's okay to have a void, to embrace doubt and the unknown with both curiosity and caution. I need to relax with these things, explore simply...
However, I am going to re-examine my past beliefs before continuing. I need to let that shit go, make sure I don't have some residue that might obstruct my perception.
Not restless, not impatient. Just annoyed.
And the reason is rather unusual.
Last night before sleep I wanted to reflect on my spiritual path. I was thinking about whether I should spend some time re-evaluating what I've been through, what I believed in and why, what truths I was avoiding, what fears I was hiding from. Or whether I should simply move on ahead, throw my spiritual baggage in the trash and start over on a blank slate.
Why does it matter?
Spirituality has been a thematic or basically essential part of my life since I was a child. Neutrality or moral chaos is a recent development since I exhausted all paths that could possibly mean anything to me or have any use to me.
How do I reconcile or let go of something that's been so fundamental to the development of my psyche?
It's not that I yearn for some kind of meaning, truth or belonging or for someone to tell me how to live or what to believe in - I am fundamentally opposed to all that. If anything, I've been seeking a sense of "alignment" more than anything, but also a sense of curiosity. The same reason I enjoy reading philosophy and psychology, spirituality is another lens through which I can view humanity.
But there is also a frustrating sense that I don't "fit" - my morals are chaotic, my beliefs are all over the place, I highly value empirical evidence but I leave room for subjective interpretations of reality. Synchronicities are real, sometimes things are just too uncanny to be dismissed as coincidence.
I keep trying to figure out if there's some logic I'm missing. If there's a misconception I have of myself or of my interpretation. Thankfully, I'm nowhere near the self-doubting delusional levels I used to be in ten years ago. But there's still always this quietly anxious sense that I can't quite trust my perception of reality sometimes. Like at any moment I might trip over myself. It's not surprising, given how many times I've betrayed myself for nothing, as Dostoyevsky would say. Building trust in my own perception is a tricky process. But this is where intuition or gut instinct comes in. It gets obscured and confused when the mind is allowed to go crazy. After all, how can you tell when you're having a bad vibe about someone because there's really something suspicious about them or whether you're just paranoid? I feel so disjointed just thinking about it, but I've made it this far in life, I can't be that bad at judging people and situations, right?
There are many senses vying for attention. Logic, emotion, intuition, instinct, belief, opinion, external sources... Faith or hope is meant to be louder or steadier than all of these things. Faith is trust despite lack of evidence. Loyalty despite doubt. This is a test that spirituality puts people through but also the thing that traps them. However, ultimately, I think it's a choice. What we believe in makes us safe, and we may choose comfort above psychologically uncomfortable truth or risk it with the unknown. I can choose too. I know what I want, how I want it. But what of my fears? What of the truth?
My problem is I want the benefits of spiritual faith but I am unable to give up self-integrity. Various occult traditions, perhaps most notably Fraternitas Saturnii and Satanism, offer both externalised power and self-knowledge. But then I run into another dilemma. My empathy, or what I believe to be empathy. I look at the world and I wonder if pursuing more selfish aims is really the right thing to do. But as I sit here and type this, I can't see an alternative. To choose a right hand path is to deny my truth. The fact that in my core I am wicked. I'm only angelic and loving to the chosen ones, who more often than not have some karmic tie to me. History preceding this life. A sense of deep familiarity. Like old flames, old friends, old family. Connections that defy norm or the usual way relationships are built between people.
I don't discard everything. At this point, all I can really trust with regard to these things is my own intuition, my own gut of what feels correct. Even me saying things like "karmic ties" that's not a belief. I don't choose to believe in reincarnation. In fact, I have no belief around it and am quite sceptical of anyone who claims to know or remember another life. But there is something in my gut, deep beyond logic or emotion or opinion. It just feels right, it aligns with some internal logic that's beyond explanation. I've always felt this way about reincarnation. It makes sense to me that energy would be recycled or transfigured. Like water evaporating from a vessel, then going to gather itself into something else. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it merely changes form or is conserved. That's the first law of thermodynamics.
Maybe the truth is that I don't understand myself enough and spirituality will never help me in that regard, at least not at this stage of my life. I am more interested in philosophy. Maybe psychology, to an extent, although I have a love-hate thing going on with Carl Jung. He has some brilliant and genuinely helpful ideas, but he can also be insufferable and ignorant as hell. A product of his time, perhaps, or maybe I just feel that way because I read a book of his that naturally invites that sort of reaction. He was weird about spiritual faith as well. Unable to believe in God but obsessed with trying to do so anyway, even if it meant dabbling in Gnosticism. He believed humanity will go insane without religion and that a secular or atheistic society would be disastrous to the psychological development of our species. Jordan Peterson spouts the same nonsense about the importance of "the narrative" even in the face of religious abuse, lies, wars, and egregious ignorance for science and basic logic. Religion and spirituality has caused nothing but grief. And before the reader jumps in with a "BUT COMMUNISM" it was literally designed as a replacement for religion, not emancipation from it. Marx no more believed "the masses" could survive without faith in a higher power/order than Jung.
But I've digressed enough.
Ultimately, I think that I need to reframe my spirituality. Move away from esoteric and occult. Not to avoid it, but neither to give more meaning than it's worth. I've been reading about the Hindu goddess Kali and also Nietzsche, so I think I ought to continue. Kali is a fascinating goddess, especially for a culture that places so little respect in women - the country with highest statistics of rape on the planet worships the fierce goddess Kali as their spiritual mother... Meanwhile Nietzsche is just a fun guy, his thoughts are satisfying to read and make sense to me. No use forcing spiritual faith on myself like Jung. It's okay to have a void, to embrace doubt and the unknown with both curiosity and caution. I need to relax with these things, explore simply...
However, I am going to re-examine my past beliefs before continuing. I need to let that shit go, make sure I don't have some residue that might obstruct my perception.
