Homework...

The last post was written in anger, it was.  In the class the instructor stepped over more than one ethical line, another line he crossed was setting as a homework assignment that the class was to duplicate his indiscretion with someone from their world and write a one page report on the “experience.”  What follows is what I’ll be turning in, for any who might be curious it speaks rather deeply to my attitudes concerning many things. I’m going to be very interested in what comes back from this one, it will tell so much concerning the true state of the local academics.

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Personal Preamble: 

Before I comply with your request that I describe an event of meditation (to my best understanding of what such an event might be in actual fact, to my best effort to set into words what is in fact beyond being conveyed by words) I wish to state as an immutable fact that I, based upon the sum of my life experience, consider any such method or system of thought to be an expression of a religious preference, not an academic discipline.  I am, and have been for some time, familiar with such concepts and again, from the sum of my life, do not engage in such modes of thought casually, certainly not to any external demand while inhabiting an alien environment. 

Perhaps unlike the other students in the class I am not of the vintage to have been so deeply  conditioned as to believe any and every offering of the education establishment will be of such an inherently safe and sane nature as to negate the responsibility of personal consent.  I had not, do not and will not consent to such a mode of thought as appropriate for any academic environment not specifically defined in advance  as dedicated to the study of such modes of thought.   The meditative state is an acutely intimate state of mind, in truth it is a state of self-induced intoxication invoked by manipulating the chemistry of the mind-body interface rather than the imbibing of any external compound, as such safety demands it must be stored in the same lock-box as it were with the other narcotic intoxicants which may, from time to time, be used with wisdom and restraint as required by some particular and finite situation but which should not be indulged in as a matter of casual recreation lest the individual be reduced into servitude to a most pernicious form of psychological addiction, a risk which to be consensual demands those unfamiliar with such modes of thought be made aware of in advance of any effort to teach them such methods.  To teach without permission is a violation of someone’s personal choice, tantamount to a psychic assault since regardless of their state of life in regards to such thoughts a bell cannot be un-rung.

I will not offer insult to any current acquaintance of mine by asking them to indulge in the same utter foolishness requested of me, but I will per your assignment describe my last experience of “being with someone” while inhabiting a shallow meditation. Since I have given you good cause to suspect what follows as being a fiction I will, by their explicit permission and upon your request, provide contact information so you may validate what follows as a recounting of reality.

The scenario was simply a room, dim and quiet across a hard night, a very hard night as my friends’ sanity hung by the most slender of threads to an act of fate attacking the innocent.  My friend and I are not from the same segments of society, in fact we are diametrically opposite on several major parameters of the human condition, and yet between us we’d built sufficient trust that when circumstances demanded an empathetic response beyond what we shared on a daily basis I had no reservations in dismissing the irrelevant to better offer support.

I suppose the best way to describe the dismissing of the irrelevant between any two humans is to compare it to looking through a condensing fog, that fog of custom and habit  that reduces empathy to a bearable burden in a world where any stranger’s glance can hit with the impact of a bullet if empathy is unrestrained.  In analogy to clear the mist of the irrelevant from one’s mind is to take command of the environment of the mind, temporarily changing the barometric pressures, redefining the source of mental energies to change the temperature and enthalpy of thought till the irrelevant condenses to fall away or fully transitions into vapor.

It is a strangely calming sensation as it occurs, and yet there is also a tension beyond describing, the tension of knowing yourself not totally yourself.  To be with another human in such a manner is to clear the fog between you, by the will set dormant the defense that fog provides and accept you’ll likely perceive, often as a visceral sensation, the differences that define you as separate individuals. It is to accept you must not flinch at what you’ll feel lest you cause harm with your response. For you what you feel is a temporary thing, for them it is the content of their life balanced in manners you’ve not adopted or experienced, to honor their trust to the limits of your endurance you must not flinch.  To “be with” another human in such a manner is not to draw close to them, it is to define a space within yourself set to null values such that in that space (but for so many reasons only that space!) there may be a region of cohabitation where the concept of “alone” cannot exist for either of those involved: it was trapped into the vanquished fog and so held beyond the perception of the moment, which is what my friend desperately needed that night, to not feel alone under such duress.

Such contact is intimate far beyond the sexual regardless of the circumstances involved, only the very deepest elements of love expressed as sexual union even approach such intimacy which is why in reverence and respect for each human being’s unique existence such contact should never be toyed with, set as some casual contrivance of entertainment.  On that path lies only callous indifference, deep jadedness, empathy inverted away from the positive to become the state of affairs all to obvious in far to many venues of the modern world.