Includes the music I included in the essay, and some extras tracks I would have liked to have included is here. You may enjoy listening to it while reading.
I Sleep Through the XXXL Mourning Alarm Bells
“Don’t give me that ‘you were heavy as a youth" bullshit!” the GP yelled at me. “You are obese, even by the lax American standards!” he continued to rant. The Dr. then pulled out a seamstress’s tape measure and measured my girth in order to put to me the ‘real’ truth, the truth of numbers for his refutation of my blind denial of the truth that I was very fat. “Forty-six inches,” he stated bluntly. No metric for him — 117cm.
I was there to get a renewal for gout medication. The year was around 2010. I wasn’t actually suffering from gout at the time, despite the fat with which I had surrounded and filled my body. And a fat that somehow I didn’t see or feel. I was there because the indomethacin — a rather nasty and common allopathic pharmaceutical for gout — that I had on hand had expired. I wanted to have some fresh pills ready for the relatively rare gout attacks that I anticipated I would experience sometime in the future.
His yelling did not change my delusion. Nor did the measurement. I continued as before.
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When I went to buy new shirts they would be XXL and on rare occasion XXXL. The dress shirt I bought for a special event around that time was tailored to accommodate the bizarre discrepancy between the diameter of my fat neck and my relative shortness.
XXXL clothes did not change my delusion. Bizarre tailoring requirements did not wake me up.
I was blind to the truth of my physical existence. I was disconnected from my body, and with that disconnection I had no tangible association between its physical expression — obesity in this case — and my muted awareness of being physically and uncomfortably alive.
Delusion Knows No Bounds, and Is Always the Other Person’s Problem
When I tell people around me ‘Delusion knows no bounds, and is always the other person’s problem’ I am speaking from experience. That deluded person being me, of course. What is kind of laughable, now, was that by then I’d spent close to thirty diligent years of continuous and rigorous self-help practices of various sorts, including an intensive study of the complete works of C.G. Jung.
Some of them made reference to embodiment and these had particular resonance with me. My having read Jung’s dream interpretation cited in Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned About Self-Healing From a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients by Bernie Siegel connected a dreamer’s dream to his physical condition. That was transformative for me, and intensified my study of Jung: Dreams were also about the body! (After that I went back to school to get the prerequisite masters degree in order to attend a Jungian institute. That experience of ‘failure to complete’ is for another story.) And while Jung and Jungians frequently connect the spiritual journey with the physical manifestations of synchronicity, physical events and other tangible happenings, that remained an idea in my head even as I filled notebooks with synchronicities and failed to see my somatic body. True embodiment into life eluded me and I stayed comfortably ensconced in the idea of embodiment, perhaps a form of what is now called mindfulness. Perhaps, more accurately, the ideology of mindfulness.
And yet, it is likely that buried in my shadow was the hope or dream of true embodiment. And that showed itself as a projection from my shadow of truth because in my various work offices I kept, carefully pinned to my wall, the following:
When we are faced with an obstacle that is to be overcome, weakness and impatience can do nothing. Strong individuals can stand up to their fate, for their inner security enables them to endure to the end. This strength shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness with themselves. It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that the light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognised (my paraphrase and emphasis I Ching 5 Hsu p.25 Baynes/Wilhelm).
My obesity was clearly not an obstacle that I perceived. Or least not one big enough for me to see the truth of it in my physical existence despite the tangible ways I struggled uncomfortably with car seatbelts, shoulder bags and tying my shoelaces. Was I projecting ineffectively that which I was in truth unable or unwilling to see? In that way was I like the loudest religious fundamentalists hoping that yelling ‘God’ would drown their inner truth which was that the faith they professed was empty, that it lacked the true embodiedknowledge of God?
“The Dreams in Which I’m Dying Are the Very Best I’ve Had.”
The ‘dream’ that I lived at that time raises the following questions for me, now that I am living in the time of covid:
What is true in the world? How do I know what is true? Is it even possible to know what is true? How and why was I so effectively self-deluded in the past? What other ways am I blind or asleep today? Was the plandemic a serious wake-up call that most slept through, remained blind to? Is that in anyway different from how I had been blind to my own obvious obesity? Is it true that the source of all suffering is the (false) perception that the world is the final complete truth, as Gautama Buddha suggests? (That is my paraphrase of the first line of Gautama Buddha’s Fourfold Path, aka the Four Noble Truths.)
Does Yoga Really Mean ‘Waking Up’? Introducing the Five Kleshas
Is it true that living the yogic principles of the five kleshas removes suffering (duhkha, in Sanskrit, meaning to be stuck in patterns that keep us from growing, keep us stuck in delusion)?
Micheal Stone defines the term klesha as coming ‘from the verbal root klis, which means ‘to suffer, torment, or distress’.
The five kleshas are:
avidya (not seeing things as they are);
raga (attachment to what gives us pleasure);
dvesa (aversion to that which gives us discomfort);
asmita (the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’);
abhinivesa (the thirst for further existence, ie the fear of the ending of the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’).
And so it is that I now understand that the ease with which I remained blind to what was obviously true, a forty-six inch waist and XXXL shirts, was comprised and supported by the principles of the five kleshas. And it just so happens that real yoga is less about the postures than it is about techniques of mind and breath, using mindfulness of the body, to remove the kleshasand to begin to see true which has the power to remove suffering.
I suggest that North American ‘yoga’ practices have been usurped by postures and with that ‘yoga’ has become another clever manifestation of the five kleshas: improper seeing, attachment to pleasure, aversion of discomfort (except for the pleasure of the false principle of no-pain no-gain), our yoga stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ that we are attached to in order to define ourselves in some beautiful and healthy way so as to avoid or deny our mortality.
Change Happened, of Course, Because the One Reliable Unchanging Truth is that Everything Changes
And yet I did change! I’m now skinny (girded with an excess of loose skin). And that change began a few years before I attended my first true yoga class in 2014. That I changed creates additional questions: what woke me up to being obese? How did I change, ie, how did I relax out of the klesha-cycling of delusion that had kept me blindly obese and contentedly suffering? How else have I changed? And what is in the power of true yoga to create lasting change and empower vidya, ie the ability to see and begin to know what is true?
Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions
Backstepping to the Big Awakening that Media Is a Manufacturer of Avidya, Delusion
I’ll leave those questions, like the rest I’ve asked, as mostly rhetorical for now. Instead of direct answers I’ll step back even further, into the 1980s. That was when I became aware of, and I now realise only partially awake to, the news media as being significantly filled with untruth. At the time I thought I had clear understanding, or vidya, full awareness of its lying nature. I was still naïve enough, then, to think that some truth was buried under the obvious untruths and that not all of the untruths were deliberate lies in order to create the confusion required to allow for the necessary illusions§ that abet the manufacture of consent† the elites deem required to manage a ‘democracy’. (Watch ‘Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media’ on the history of the elite’s desire to manage the unkempt undeserving masses.)
With that innocent understanding of the true nature of the news, I simply stopped attending it because I didn’t have the time to figure out what within it was true and what wasn’t. I discarded the news as having no discernible value and eventually I stopped watching, listening or reading it altogether. That served me well when media lying frenzy went into overdrive in 2019, as I wrote in my first substack
Yesterday, in part synchronicity and in part inspiration, I watched Brecht Arnaert’sinterview of Anneka Lucas’s childhood experiences and survival of satanic sexual abuse in the 1970s in Belgium. Brecht said:
If you start talking to people about that, [satanic rituals and things like the crazy inconsistencies of the official 9/11 narrative, or the ‘official’ story of the JFK assassination, or the bizarre impossible suicides of people like Epstein,] they look at you as if you’re crazy. And we—it’s the obverse: we are crazy to believe what comes on television. To me that is real craziness. And since I’ve stopped watching television I have regained my senses. — Brecht Arnaert 30 Sept 2022
(I would add that it is equally important to stop reading and listening to the official media.)
Calling Out Media Lies Slides Off the Media and Its Consumers Like Water Off a Duck’s Back
One time I even confronted an editorialist who blatantly, provably, lied. I wrote him a letter directly and then indirectly through his ethical standards board. He rationalised the lie as being an opinion and the ethical board did a peculiar sidestep and didn’t directly address my issue while dismissing my letter as a list of how the editor had lied.
And I was continually surprised that most people around me were content to be lied to. Then, like now and how the media presented and continues to present covid’s health ‘false-truths’, it wasn’t as if the media was being particularly clever or obtuse liars. Well, except that I now recognise that these obvious lies are deliberately obvious in order to deflect from the really biglies and to create confusion. And it turns out that the one hundred years or so of mind controlling/brain washing media propaganda has been effective in creating a society of ‘rabbits’, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. The west would write ‘sheep’, of course, not ‘rabbits’ for those who swallowed the lies. The ideologically induced blindness of Solzhenitsyn’s Russians is eerily parallel to the media induced blindness I see today.
Back when I was actively doing my best to wake up people to the media’s misrepresentations — even while being asleep to my own obvious delusions — some people acknowledged or had an inkling that there were media misrepresentations from time-to-time. That was, for them, a kind of worst case scenario and that that was mostly human fallibility, not a planned course of media action to achieve nefarious ‘democratic’ ends. To them the agenda of news was truth, and in that pursuit of truth errors were unfortunate, although not unexpected. And now I see that my efforts to wake up the others from their delusion was, in fact, the shadow of my delusion projected onto them.
Waking up is so hard to do, and waking others is even harder to do.
Here a Shadow, there a Shadow, Everywhere a Darkling Shadow
During the interview Lucas on several occasions tells Arnaert that, as she was being tortured or abused in some way, that she understood that the abuser was in fact beating her in order to keep his inner shadow locked inside him (passim “Epoché #003 - Anneke Lucas”. This is an awareness that most people at any age are unwilling or even incapable of accepting: that the unconscious has greater power over us than consciousness. Her awareness of this is of the highest level of being awake.
Jung cogently argues that consciousness is like a tiny cork bobbing on the surface of the ocean.
One is inclined to think that ego-consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious, at least one hopes that such a solution is possible. But unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown? Even if you can form a fairly complete picture of the anima and animus, this does not mean that you have plumbed the depths of the unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousmy emphasis).
What is unconscious and not aligned with the reality of our experience will express itself in our dreams and/or in how we create our own dream-world through projection of that shadow we don’t want to see and often don’t see.
Stephen Batchelor describes how he created a Tibetan Buddhist lie (shadow) when he saw the Dalai Lama during a rain storm.
After the Dalai Lama left and the crowd dispersed, I joined a small group of fellow Injis. In reverential tones, we discussed how the lama on the hill — whose name was Yeshe Dorje — had prevented the storm from soaking us. I heard myself say: "And you could hear the rain still falling all around us: over there by the Library and on those government buildings behind as well." The others nodded and smiled in awed agreement.
Even as I was speaking, I knew I was not telling the truth. I had heard no rain on the roofs behind me. Not a drop. Yet to be convinced that the lama had prevented the rain with his ritual and spells, I had to believe that he had created a magical umbrella to shield the crowd from the storm. Otherwise, what had happened would not have been that remarkable. Who has not witnessed rain falling a short distance away from where one is standing on dry ground? Perhaps it was nothing more than a brief mountain shower on the nearby hillside. None of us would have dared to admit this possibility. That would have brought us perilously close to questioning the lama's prowess and, by implication, the whole elaborate belief system of Tibetan Buddhism.
For several years, I continued to peddle this lie. It was my favourite (and only) example of my firsthand experience of the supernatural powers of Tibetan lamas. But, strangely, whenever I told it, it didn't feel like a lie. I had taken the lay Buddhist precepts and would soon take monastic vows. I took the moral injunction against lying very seriously (p4-5 Confessions of a Buddhist Atheistmy emphasis).
It seems, by this short account, that Batchelor chose to be blind much like the naked emperor’s court: fear that the truth would dismantle the authority system.
Chomsky described something similar, when asked why news people lie. Paraphrased, his answer was that most people, barring sociopaths and the like, aren’t comfortable with lying. So, in a likely mostly unconscious indoctrination, not too dissimilar from what Batchelor described, the news creators stop seeing the lie.
I’ll add, today, my own observation that they likely have dark shadows that get vociferously projected outwards onto others as evil conspiracy theorist and dis-information fear mongers that get pilloried by official ‘truth’ tellers that became prominent in the time of covid.
In the language of Yogi-Buddhist scholar and teacher, Michael Stone, a large part of my blindness to my obesity was my inability to ‘give space’ to the trauma, the rage and sorrow and grief engendered in early life compounded by a protracted co-dependency relationship. Without space for these emotions to be experienced, the rage turns into a kind of killing machine, a shadow that expresses itself with violence towards the other or towards the self. My obesity was rage against my self. Anneke Lucas somehow saw that the torturing and killing satanists were in fact torturing and killing themselves, because they didn’t, couldn’t see her as a human child in their efforts to keep their shadow locked down without space to be.
Stone Expounds on Rage as Expression of the Shadow
What is suffering? It is when we are experiencing something but we can’t find any space around it. It is a lack of space. That is a problem. Our problems are when something is showing up that we can’t perceive with any space around it. And when you let go of your expectations space arises.
…
The opposite of space is rage. Rage carries a lot of sorrow in it. And we’re too good at covering up our sorrow, and maintaining our rage. We’re so good at it. But if you can feel your sorrow, it will bring a collapse of rage. And we need grief so that we can embody our sorrow. And we need space so we can feel our sorrow without the default of rage.
Rage is exhausting and being a yogi we are committed to a practice of non-violence. And so that means learning how to grieve and to feel sorrow. And doing something about it. But not doing something about it when we are in a rage. Doing something about it when we are in the sorrow place. If our grief can’t be held in our body, then we will kill. We’ll kill space, we’ll kill people, we’ll kill ourselves, we’ll kill everybody we love.
Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you. 🙏
Blinded by our truth....Self deception. Certainly one of our most ruthless abusers.
Equally true and relevant, if not more so, when applied with a broad brush - at the societal level. Looking at what has transpired during the Covid years....it is like a tapestry of shadows, woven together, and projected back. Revealing our true health - as a society and a community.
Thank you for writing this. I have been thinking a lot about how hard it can be to be honest with ourselves and how our emotions, either expressed or repressed effect our bodies. I am in the process of shedding more illusions, excess body weight and embracing uncomfortable truths. I can really relate to how deep our own denial and delusions sometimes are and how hard it can be to just acknowledge and be honest about what is true.
So far for me the initial pain of facing difficult truths has opened me up to feeling more fully alive and releasing the energy I was using pretending that everything is ok to heal myself. Lying to ourselves takes tremendous energy away from us, energy we could use for healing or creative projects.
Excellent, Guy.
Blinded by our truth....Self deception. Certainly one of our most ruthless abusers.
Equally true and relevant, if not more so, when applied with a broad brush - at the societal level. Looking at what has transpired during the Covid years....it is like a tapestry of shadows, woven together, and projected back. Revealing our true health - as a society and a community.
Thank you for writing this. I have been thinking a lot about how hard it can be to be honest with ourselves and how our emotions, either expressed or repressed effect our bodies. I am in the process of shedding more illusions, excess body weight and embracing uncomfortable truths. I can really relate to how deep our own denial and delusions sometimes are and how hard it can be to just acknowledge and be honest about what is true.
So far for me the initial pain of facing difficult truths has opened me up to feeling more fully alive and releasing the energy I was using pretending that everything is ok to heal myself. Lying to ourselves takes tremendous energy away from us, energy we could use for healing or creative projects.
Peace. 🪷