Unpublished Philosophy Rant- Nietzsche's Onion, Karmic Religions and CPTSD

I looked at my blog today and realised I haven't been posting in a bit. I wrote this post (unfinished on 29th Feb) and I think it had an interesting line of thought, though I didn't really end up completing it. But I will post it anyway

Hello everyone to another rant a night before an exam as has become the norm in college. I have learnt better than to compromise with my creativity now - if something wants to express itself through me, I don't really possess the power anymore to stop its spontaneous flow. 

So anyway, what I am talking about today is going to be rather personal and I don't know how much it would be useful for you to know but regardlesss I do feel there is a journey I need to express here.

Loving children is hard work. I mean I'm not even at the stage of my life yet where I am in the space of thinking about such a task but it still seems intimidating; seeing how screwed up we are as people, it is intimidating to take that much absolute responsibility for another life and shaping them. So with that disclaimer and also me saying that I'm extremely grateful to my parents for having tried their best in raising me I will come to talking about what I really want to talk about. 

I had a somewhat rocky childhood. Now I want to preface this by saying that I'm not blaming anyone for whatever happened and also trying to not give in to the urge of minimizing whatever I went through by saying "it wasn't that bad". So take it as you will. If we're really compassionate with ourselves and look back at our lives there really are moments that make us go "Holy shit, I made it through that". 

I have recently been delving quite deeply into literature, videos and books about CPTSD and attachment theory like around this time last year I was delving into ADHD. I think there's great utility to learning about such topics - though there is a part of us that has the tendency to go "that's literally me" with every mental illness and self diagnose, if we're mature with how we go about it we see that all these different definitions are like labels for different types of movement of the mind. You can identify patterns of behaviour, connect it with certain symptoms and learn how other people who have those symptoms to higher or lower degrees function in the world. It is like a fun game in a sense, I see it quite like learning different movements such as yoga or calisthenics or dance and seeing how physical bodies end up expressing themselves in dynamic ways and how these may be used for correcting or regulating to lead a healthier life. 

That is another thing I have been exploring. After my friend and I randomly decided to run a 10k after waking up at 2 in the night one day, (where my motivation was just to see what my body was capable of), I got an overuse injury in my knee. This got me learning many different rehab techniques and seeing the amazing things people do after getting injured and the sheer creativity the human spirit has in overcoming these obstacles is inspiring. Looking at movement as mostly a creative expression, or for aesthetic development of the body or for training one's mindset, this whole dimension of health which is almost a physiological hygeine was closed to me. Seeing this, it kinda resonated deeply with me and reminded me (weirdly) of Patanjali's notion of "saucha". A pristine cleanliness in some sense. 

Anyways what I wanted to talk about was an interesting pattern I had seen myself using. The karmic religions and spirituality as it is propagated in pop culture is about "transcending the ego". Navigating through my symptoms of, well nothing in particular but just a rather eccentric movement of thought (with characteristics in some senses similar to that of adhd, and in other senses similar to someone having cptsd because of emotional neglect and brutal criticism leading to toxic shame) I somehow picked up on this idea. If you have a harsh self critic driving you always towards perfectionism, the wounds you inflict on your sense of self leave you feeling like the final horcrux from that one scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2. It's like your wounded inner child is crying in the corner as the toxic voice continues to rail on it. At one point in time you even come to realise that there's no productive work being accomplished by you doing this yet the critic continues anyway. We would blame the critic in this instance but since there is no differentiation between "the critic" and "the inner child" it's interesting to note that the inner child wants this dynamic too; It is what gives it a sense of security and what it has gotten used to. In religious language perhaps, you have fallen in love with your suffering. The thing that brings instant transformation is just having the striking clarity become apparent to you that the dynamic accomplishes nothing for you except prolonging the toxicity, and in being able to see this even when your body psychosomatically pushes you against holding on to this truth. 

People with harsh inner critics are also quite resentful towards the world. The critic realises that you are not intrinsically more or less valuable than the people around you, so he berates everyone around you as being superficial and worthless and judges you with standards even higher than those he holds for people around you. The "special" toxic dynamic between the inner child and the critic is hence rationalized to him in this way. To justify your lack of love for yourself, it is easier to start hating the world disguised as pure rationality (to be fair, the world does make it quite easy with how much suffering there is). 

I had similar thoughts. Everyone is superficial, and society is becoming only more superficial. The ideals of a self or the ideals of a non-self in their total negation of the narcisstic center are are quite appealing from a naively spiritual perspective.

It is easy to harbour such intense self hatred that the harsh critic succeeds in crushing the inner child down to nothing without you even realising, and masking it as spirituality. If both of them are equally illusions, that means both of them are equally unworthy and must be torn down. But if both of these facets of your personality are torn down, the inner critic wins - It was the will towards non-being in the first place. 

Of course, these texts are open to interpretation and it is only through genuinely engaging with these ideas to the greatest depth I could that I realised that there's no getting away from the work of healing. The inner child must reconcile with the harsh critic. The ego needs to be transcended; but before you rise to "enlightenment", you need to have something healthy to come back to otherwise there is no difference between you and an addict.