Humpjones

Been a Long Time Gone

Posted Nov 16, 2011

“Where you been, Uncle Hump?” For once, the answer is simple: waking up.

Few things are more dangerous than believing your own hype, especially when you lack any of the real-world skills required to actually live up to the legend. I can rap, write and fuck, and up until 2011, that was really about it. Not much of a resume, you know what I mean?

So what changed? Well, here’s a thousand words, for starters…

I would be hard pressed to say if my heart was broken open, or my head. Based on my experience, though, it definitely felt like everything began and ended in my chest. Heartache is certainly nothing new to me, but the intensity of it was. Smug neurologist types discount the very existence of heartache—Carl Zimmer dismisses it as “brainache.” Despite my disagreement, he might easily be right, and it doesn’t matter either way. I don’t need to convince anyone reading this that kind of pain is real. You know.

So: It began as a heartache without apparent cause and deepened and persisted until I fell asleep exhausted. When I woke up the next morning feeling exactly the same, I realized something was up. What followed is something I am still at a loss to describe. I was definitely in states I can only compare to bad trips and insanely powerful drugs. I consistently had the sense that my experience was being guided by Something Else, yet I cannot recall ever actually interacting with the Other.

Incoherent story short, I was basically forced to confront myself as I actually am...for six days.

In the bewilderment after all this finally subsided, I was reminded of a cold December morning in St. Johnsbury, Vermont back when I was in the third grade. Some enterprising Evangelist had dumped hundreds, maybe even thousands, of those little Jack T. Chick comic books. I remember them being scattered all over the place, and I remember sitting down and reading THIS WAS YOUR LIFE from cover to cover. Even then, it was absurd to me that God would individually watch movies of every human being’s life, but the imagery was powerfully simple enough to stick with me ever since.

That comic, ridiculous as it all was, is basically what happened to me. I have never been through anything remotely like it.

As I’ve covered before here, science is brutal stuff. Men and women in starchy white coats will do things like torture mice in order to observe whether or not other mice have a physical reaction to seeing the agony of their fellow prisoners. (They do, of course...yet another experiment that could have been avoided altogether by simply asking any child.)

Since that experiment was initially performed in 2006, it’s been replicated in nearly a hundred metal rooms around the world...you know, just to be sure. Just to be thorough, just to be objective, and just to fine tune the findings and figure out what the physical mechanisms at work were. The answers led to mirror neurons, vagus nerves, and the puzzle pieces that make up the Science of Heartache. And it’s not much.

Latin is a dead language in every possible sense. Rome burned to the ground like it deserved to and the great Empire tongue became the secret code of celibates and pedophiles for a thousand years...today, it’s deader still, weaponized by the grim cult of Science into a system for rendering our common sense experience into unreadable jargon. Thus does “heartache” become “stress cardiomyopathy,” for instance.

Modern superstitious primitives are given magic formulas to ward away the terror of the unknown: as lots of “rational” guys have explained to me over the years, love is just a matter of chemicals, see, and...well, you may already know, all too well, where that empty line of thinking leads young men. So I question the wisdom in laying out the chain of causality here, especially when it’s built on such fragile and fleeting data points. Whether you believe in cortisol or oxytocin, Artemis or Isis, the throbbing physical pain of heartache burns the brain empty. When you’re sobbing on a sofa, Science does you about as much good as one of your parents giving you an awkward speech over the phone about “other fish in the sea.”

I’m fortunate to have a large and strange international network, and I’ve been told this experience is nothing new. I have been given detailed, eloquent explanations of what happened as a Kundalini event, as a Saturn Return phenomena, and a miraculously simple matter of bioelectricity and some disputed properties of my DNA. My critical and cynical brain will only accept all this as mere primate guesswork, Anthropology at best. I’m a dick like that...and thank Ganesh for that much.

Skeptic I may be, but the rawness of it all left me shaken. It feels like a giant punctuation mark separating my life before and...well, whatever the hell is going on in my head now. I joke about being a Recovering Asshole but the fact is, I’ve been fairly lost since this occurred. I don’t know what happened to me. I also don’t know how to honor what I was given and I don’t know how to integrate what I learned. I can at least promise to keep y’all posted.

I do know that I was living inside my head altogether too much. In breaking open my heart, I felt firsthand how much information is swimming through my veins. I was tuning out most of my body and I suspect I’m hard at work forging those same shackles again. My ego has an immune system of its own, and it has been raging to regain control of the circus. 2012 will be, as promised by every charlatan I’ve spat in the lying face of, a powerfully strange year of personal transformation. Amen.

Pema Chodron: ‎"Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things.”

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