Journals of Lord Malinov

the poetry of madness

Slices

Relaxation has produced interesting effects.

As I approached an intersection doing forty, I realized that one of the cars approching obliquely had not begun to slow for the red light facing that direction.  Without a ripple of adrenalized fear, I continued into the intersection, keeping an eye on the car heading for a collision with my passenger side.  Once I felt certain that no last-minute attempt to stop would be introduced in sufficient time by my intersector, I sped my car just enough to escape the crash.  Like millimeters just past the driver's eyes.  They stopped in a panic, halfway through the intersection and patiently waited for the light to turn green, somewhat obsessed, it seemed, with the state of their undergarments. 

I carried on my conversation with Cats, only commenting on the near-miss when a good moment for a topic change happened.

My video gaming has begun to experience the same positive calm results.  Calm gives control which positively influences results. 

Panic is useless.  Adrenal highs are essential, when used where appropriate.  They are deadly when used persistently.

My driving, on the whole, has improved immensely.  Being calm has a strong tendency to fixate me in the present, more interested in present sensory stimuli than in rehashing unrelenquished emotional states.  Driving is pretty simple when I pay attention.

My ADD is non-problematic, although I've had to take a gradual approach to quitting the adderol.  Cold turkey on amphetimines generates a period of complete exhaustion that lasts several days, at least.  I haven't had any Lexapro in three weeks and haven't even come close to panic in two months.  I did go cold turkey on the lexapro, which should have generated high levels of anxiety, especially since I was still taking anxiety-inducing amphetimines.  I have not felt a thing.

At some point the language takes hold, and I suspect there is no real need for further training after this point.  However, further training clearly still has further effects on me.  My meditations go deeper and my calm is more and more unflappable.  So many questions need to be answered.

Anxiety, it seems to me, is a product of introducing a temporal element to imagined fears - the imaginary tiger that came yesterday may attack tomorrow.  Anxiety, I would conjecture, was born when time was introduced into our language.  Until we can speak of the tiger that might attack tomorrow, we cannot be anxious about it.

Notice that fear is not synonymous with anxiety at this point.  Without language we may fear the future but anxiety requires us to be able to formulate the future threat.  I know there are about a trillion assumptions in there.  It is difficult to be rigorous.

As velocity increases, time contracts.  At the speed of light, time is unchanging.  Photons exist out of time. 

We watched part of Saw2 the other night, a girl thrown into a pit to look for a key in a mass of dirty glass hypodermics.  I felt the horrid revulsions of forced empathy, but my body ignored the whole scene so the pains were forgotten as quickly as they arose.  Cats had the same indifference.  We watched Dracula, a movie that had always bothered her in the past, both hooked up for training.  The movie was enjoyable, but no panic made the impact far less terrible than I had always known before. 

We had both generally avoided horror movies because of the emotional collateral damage that could result.  A serious emotional jolt could stay with me for a week or more, dragging me into an abyss that always threatened to linger. 

I'm interested to discover if the training tends to eliminate nightmares, or reduce their impact.  I have been thinking that our imaginative thought has grown out of our dream state, but neglected to carry over the paralysis that typifies the dream states.  Training isolates the imagination from the flight-fight response.

Even a short dose of training makes me feel good.  It pushes me into calmness, even when I can't calm myself.  It reminds me how and teaches me anew.

Time slows down when I calm.  If I became perfectly calm, I would become pure energy and time would cease to exist for me.

See you on the other side.

M

posted by: Malinov at 14:04 | link | comments |

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