Everybody on the Internet claims to be an empath, but I know that can't be true because if it were heads would be catching on fire left and right.

The Internet takes you from holocaust to gunshot wound to sneering satirical news story to cat meme to sentimentality porn to actual porn in a matter of seconds.  My brain can't deal with it.  My adrenals are shot and I feel the confusion in my body too as restlessness, fear, low-level chronic pain.  I have to find a place to put it where it doesn't hurt me as much.  Recipes and emails, only.  Maybe some crochet patterns.  It's easier by far to trust the televised news than to wade through the layers of propaganda, opportunism, advertisement, and plain hack, hollow journalism on here.  Who can you trust?  NPR? Reuters? My suspicion never stops, my "follow the money" never stops and the gnawing distrust, the refusal to be a sucker--it never allows me to relax and yet...I end up believing everything anyway.  Or more specifically, I still bear the psychic burden of being perpetually in a defensive mode, not quite believing anything I read, the burden of perpetual uncertainty, AS WELL AS, all the fear, guilt, shame, empathy, joy, envy, etc. of just believing and accepting everything I see/read at face value.  

I'm not trying to sound special here, honestly I think I relate to the Internet this way because of my age.  I grew up attuned to network television, books, radio.  When we got cable, especially MTV, I thought the wide world of options and the rapid cuts from shot to shot might eventually drive me crazy.  Well, I guess ultimately they did.   

I don't know how anybody stands it, but younger people, they've always had to process at this pace, they don't know any other way.   I don't know whether to pity or envy them, I wish I could see side-by-side brain scans of my brain and a 20 year-old's brain. How does a brain withstand an entire lifetime on the Internet?  Will it end up stronger, smarter, more resilient?  Will it burn out faster?  Last longer?  Lack vital survival skills: an attention span, for example?

I watched three videos on YouTube yesterday of people who had claimed to have gone to hell and returned, then I watched the governor's update on coronavirus numbers, then later some old Saturday night live clips, and then a short doc about a family-owned restaurant in Brooklyn.  I watched another YouTube video months ago of Sadhguru explaining the reason so many people have thyroid malfunctions nowadays.  He said the role of the thyroid, in part, was to sort of contextualize all the stimuli that a person encounters over the course of time, stitch it together in an understandable narrative and sort of metabolically, hormonally, prepare the body to accept that stimuli as being normal/natural.  The thyroid's job, he said, was to protect the person from being jerked around (I'm paraphrasing) by all the disparate information within his surroundings, to regulate the body's response and keep it functioning evenly, predictably.

Well, think of the demands the Internet--on top of the regular-occurring stimuli of daily life--makes of the little thyroid captain.  Here's a terrifying story about how we're all going to die, and now here's Gwenyth Paltrow reading her mom's texts, and now here's statistics on racial violence in America, here's an article about how you are complicit in said racial violence, here's a discussion thread with posts by women who've experienced late miscarriage and now the phone is ringing and somebody in the family is sick and now there's a flash flood alert and a siren is blaring outside and ask not for whom the siren blares!! 

Moral of the story: cancer in my thyroid. 

Lately conceptualizing an overarching, ubiquitous consciousness within which we, as individuals, are immersed always.  The consciousness is a broad river, constantly moving.  I picture our bodies like cups.  I see a string of cups suspended just above the river, each with a tiny hole in the bottom.  The river rushes up and fills the cups, but then, slowly, day after day, the water from the cups drains back into the moving river.  Once you've gone completely back into the river, are you the same as you were in the cup?  Yes and no, back in the river you're not configured the same way, but you're not destroyed either, you're free to join your source--to finally rejoin the whole.  The separation, the cup, is temporary--it's limiting, confining, and fragile.  The river is forever though, and will keep on filling different cups--an endless variety of cups--that in turn will drain back into the river, on and on, etc.

It's hard to believe in God, it's hard for me.  I'm reading a book on Hermeticism and one of its major precepts is that old chestnut: "As above, so below" which the Lord's Prayer also echoes ("Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"). Occurred to me suddenly while watching TV yesterday, probably not a revelation to anybody else, but--look how a mother is a model for God on earth.  A mother loves her child unconditionally, sacrifices herself, devotes herself to the child's needs.  The mother creates the child in her womb, the child is part of her, yet separate.  The child might receive adequate love and attention from the mother, yet still turn out to be selfish and irresponsible. Not every mother is God-like in her child's life in the sense of being very loving  or even in the custodial sense, but every one is in the creator sense.  It's a universal truth, not even just a human truth--the drive of the mother, after having created her offspring, to protect and care for them.  When you zoom out from this planet, from this plane of existence, I believe this pattern probably persists at a macro-level.  A benevolent creator who tries to guide, who tries to nurture its creation--not just for the sake of the creation, but for the sake of the creator itself.  It's not just an altruistic, self-sacrificing drive either--in a way there is self-preservation at stake too, the deep desire to perpetuate one's being through progeny, to be a part of the future---of indefinite generations going on--in a way, to live eternally.  What's set in motion, stays in motion.  For motion's sake alone! 

The squirrels came and ate all the pears off of Joe's trees and afterward he commented how much stronger the trees looked--how they weren't sagging anymore and the leaves looked greener, more lush.  Sometimes when you lose everything you thought was valuable it's like a new vitality comes over you.  When you unload your fruits, you are stripped of the weight of all the expectations that accompanied that fruit--all the pies and cobblers you would have had to produce! There is a new freedom in just having to put energy into the core, build up the roots and trunk, don't worry about the products anymore.  Take the sun and water and put it right into your very center and next season--watch out.  The bounty will be astounding. 

Over the course of your life you become different things to different people.  You're not a Good Person or a Bad Person.  You are your actions at any given time.  You are an instrument of karma, maybe. This age of social media has perverted the ego even further beyond how perverted it already was.  Every person sees himself as being primary, as being The Center.  The bigger picture gets obscured when you focus on yourself as Main Character.  Think about how you have been a catalyst in the lives of others.  I have been cruel to others and hurt them, but I have been loving too and have helped some people.  A lot of times I have played a bit part or had some slight influence on another person's life for better or worse.  Isn't that just as important as being a protagonist?  Maybe it's more important in a way.  

When I went crazy back in high school the people with whom I had brief interactions--a receptionist, a cashier, a person passing on the street--glowed with a sort of holiness.  They became angels to me, or devils.  I saw them as guides and tempters, deities who were continuously putting me to the test.  

I'm not really crazy anymore (?), but it's interesting to think about all the roles we play in the lives of others.  How many times are we unaware that we have saved somebody or edged them closer to despair? I have to get my head out of the Internet circle jerk and really take this to heart.  I'm just a strand in a web. When I interact with another--let it be with love and gentleness, because my role as a bit player in so many other people's lives might count for way more, in the end, than what who I think I am as the star of the show. 

Ram Dass said, "Treat every person you meet as if he were God in drag." That is a new mantra.  I have been overcome lately by a feeling of relief.  A relief in letting the old idea of how important I was dissolve and fall away.  I listen to people's accounts of Near Death Experiences on YouTube every night and play Dr. Mario and they are all so similar.  They talk about a life review and feeling the pain you caused others as your own pain, and the joy and comfort you caused others as your own joy and comfort.  I feel I've always suspected that's how it would be.  That you'd have to balance the books this way in the end.  

They all say they feel enveloped by love, they don't feel frightened and they don't feel alone.  I hope it's real, I hope it's real, I hope it's real.