Fear, Meditation and Poppies

It’s weird and I don’t understand it. I can go for days (weeks? I doubt weeks) living in this box with the closest thing to human contact being the voices that sing to me out of my computer but then, with no warning, a feeling of solitude hits me like a pyramid dropped on me from out of low Earth orbit. It brings along a trailer filled with the threat of panic. I know that’s what I would have to deal with if I can peek out from under the pyramid. That is what opiates are for: they wrap you in a comfy cushion that insulates you from everything uncomfortable. Just lean back into it and soak up the total lack of…well, anything that might cause you pain or fear or the problems that come with being a social animal without a society to belong to. And that society can even be just one other person. I guess that all I’m doing with this perambulating paragraph is using a whole lot of words to describe and define “loneliness” and its potential terror and, therefore, its danger. Yes, when you are of a certain turn of mind, opiates keep you safe. Safe from what, you ask? Safe from yourself really, because if you don’t have SOMETHING to kill the loneliness and the fear and the fear of loneliness, all you have left is the ability to kill. If you lose control of whatever mechanism you have to suppress your feelings. It’s feelings that are the real danger, once you have stripped away all of the layers of its disguises. Opiates are painkillers and what is pain? Pain is a feeling and quite possibly the purest and most basic of the entire range of feelings that you can experience (and if you can’t experience something then it certainly is not a feeling, or a problem for that matter). All of those “centring” exercises? They are all designed to purify your consciousness and to leave only your ego, your YOU, free of distractions. Distractions that include feelings. That centre you aim for IS the essential “you.” Do you think it’s a coincidence that the parts of the world that developed meditation are also parts of the world where opium poppies grow? I think not.