The above image was done using stable diffusion using the prompt 'struck by lightning meditating.'
Here in Minnesota, autumn is upon us. The maples are turning red, the elms are turning yellow, and the wind is bitter cold. Every day there's less and less sun. Every night there's more and more darkness.
It's the time of year when people have historically turned inward. People still turn inward during these dark days, though many do so unconsciously while filling their time with endless distractions. The traditionally-minded seek guidance from a deity or their ancestors. The more contemporary encounter imbalances within and attribute the discomfort this produces to seasonal affective disorder.
My own path into darkness this year has been punctuated by cluster headache attacks. Every day for weeks now I've been overwhelmed and tortured by blood vessels in my head crushing my brain from the inside out. Research suggests that the episodes arise in the hypothalamus, but beyond that their cause is a mystery. Experiencing this condition's indescribable horror again and again while trying to hold some semblance of a life together is beyond alienating. It's like being trapped in a supernatural nightmare.
In this context, I cling to any spiritual ground I can find. I'm of the opinion that cluster headaches and similarly gruesome expressions of biology disprove the existence of the loving and omnipotent deity of the Abrahamic faiths, so I find no solace in the beliefs of my recent ancestors. The paganism of my more distant ancestors comes a little closer. Those old gods tormented us puny humans with wild abandon.
Of course, in practical terms, the gods don't matter. What matters more is the immortal soul, the awareness of which gives rise to meaningful operations of consciousness. Imagining the souls of departed loved ones nearby can work wonders through the most challenging moments. Imagining an afterlife has value, especially in hard times.
There's a new age belief that every immortal soul signs a soul contract and comes to Earth voluntarily to learn lessons by acting out dramas with other souls. From this perspective, every life event, good and bad, was carefully planned out by your soul with the other souls involved. This idea has merit to the extent that it encourages people to take more responsibility for their experiences. But it's also a way to blame victims for their own misfortunes, in much the same way as the the idea of karma is used in some cultures to blame the disabled for being disabled.
Personally, I can imagine souls making agreements outside of time about what will transpire in our world. I mean, why not? Yet if something like this is indeed how it works, I highly doubt that the whole thing is so individualistic. I definitely don't think we get to choose everything that happens to us individually. If we did, literally no one would choose cluster headaches.
No one wants to passionately wish for death while simultaneously fighting like hell to survive. No one wants to be tortured thousands of times. And there are far worse fates. I very much doubt we choose these fates ourselves. But I could see them being assigned to us by the soul groups we choose to work with.
After all, our human dramas involve every kind of character. Someone has to play the the bad roles. Killers. Abusers. Oppressors. The downtrodden. The sick. Soul groups of every size, from families to nations, need these characters as much as they need anyone else. Perhaps to an immortal soul a lifetime is but an instant and even the grimmest horror amounts to little more than a quality of that instant. Maybe even the worst tragedies appear as positive contributions to our growth and development when viewed from the afterlife.
One thing cluster headaches taught me early on was that my life is mostly not about me. How could it be? Nothing I could possibly get out of the experience of being on this planet will ever make the nightmare okay. No benefit of living that I might someday receive could ever be adequate compensation for the unpleasantness that I've already endured. After accepting this decades ago, it became clear that I was never in this world for my own sake. And I realized that I must instead be here for the benefit of other people.
This wasn't a welcome realization. I am at best unimpressed with most people so the idea that my life purpose might mostly be about them brought up all kinds of resistance. It seemed like a grand injustice that anyone else might benefit from my life while I myself was immersed in torment and misery. And it was a grand injustice, but thinking like that never led me anywhere good.
When you're sick, it's easy to resent the healthy. When you're poor, it's easy to resent the comfortable. When you're comfortable and healthy, it's easy to treat the less fortunate like garbage without even realizing it. And the cycle of resentment continues.
In nature, there's no such thing as justice. Reward and punishment exist only as amoral environmental mechanics. Yet nearly everyone develops an innate sense of fairness at a young age. And many religions suggest that our immortal souls are judged according to a more cosmic variety of fairness once these lives are over.
Personally, I think the whole notion of cosmic judgment is nonsense. People who believe in it are imposing their uniquely human perspective onto the incomprehensible divine. And yet, our universal and irrational expectation of fairness has its place. It is the ground upon which all cooperative endeavors are necessarily built.
The psychological impact of cluster headaches can be devastating. Even with good medical and social support, the condition messes with your mind. The only way I've found to manage this involves continually practicing the kinds of inner work that people have always practiced to cultivate and refine consciousness. Presence. Breathing. Meditation. Communication with the unconscious. Stuff like that.
One consequence of this practice is that it has given me an exceedingly high tolerance for troubling information. For the last decade my main job has been summarizing news reports about corruption and cover-ups for WantToKnow.info. We cover the absolute darkest stuff. Many people would have a hard time dealing with the disturbing details of various atrocities all of the time. Not me. At this point, I'm totally inured to it.
Another consequence of my condition is that it has shown me exactly where my power is and where it is not. I've found that my only real power is in how I choose to use my time, and my time is limited. During a headache cluster, it's not unusual for me to have just 2-3 hours per day when I'm functional enough to send an email or walk to the grocery store. This can go on for weeks or months.
Living with this sometimes extreme constraint has led me to value whatever time I have immensely. It's also forced me to learn to use this time more wisely, and to be exceedingly discerning about what I put my energy into. These are lessons many people don't learn until old age, if ever.
This year, entering the darkness of winter while enduring wave after wave of terrible pain, watching our corrupt rulers suck us deeper and deeper into dystopia, I see ample cause for pessimism. Or nihilism, for that matter. But that's not where my thinking is. Society as a whole is obviously headed for trouble. Systems are crumbling. Comic book villains seem to be making all of the big decisions. Yet we can make our little corners of the world into whatever we want. Even in dystopia, we can thrive.
My great hope for the season is that masses of people turn inward and find there the resolve to stop making the world worse and start making it better. My more realistic hope is that some good shows come out this winter. Never underestimate the power of fiction to improve the real. The stories we use to make sense of reality have a habit of shaping reality itself.
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