Here’s an update on my life. It contains nothing about movies, but plenty of coarse language.
Life feels different. I’ve had this persistent sense for almost a year now that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. Like the world has appeared beyond a thin veil, one which I’m intuiting can be removed were I to find the key.
It seems this intuition has foreshadowed a transition into a new paradigm – a new way of operating in the world. For those of you who are into Spiral Dynamics, it seems to be the shift from Yellow to Turqoise.
It’s not yet a stable realization, though more often than before, I’m awash in feelings of gratitude. I’m frequently awash in a deepened experience of beauty, of somethin akin to perfection. It’s like it’s pinning me down, tearing into the center of my chest and piercing my heart open. I weep regularly. I whisper “thank you thank you thank you” at random moments through the day, while tears stream down my face. I shake a lot as intense energy is moving through my body. And my relationships have improved massively.
Jesus feels close. And Buddha. All kinds of spiritual figures appear in my internal world these days.
After having practiced meditation for almost 13 years – and applied myself wholeheartedly to inner revolution for every day in that process – it seems I’m starting to experience something that can be described as spirituality.
From this place, I experience two things: An enormous appreciation for people, especially those who dare to be themselves, who dare set forth into the world with their hearts open, hellbent on expressing themselves at any cost. Whether it be those genius, cheeky guys in Ylvis who have contaminated us all with that annoyingly genious Fox song or Edvard Munch, who I experienced like never before two days ago in the Munch 150 exhibition here in Oslo Norway.
I have strong feelings of appreciation for all the people in the world who dare to give, who dare to be themselves. I feel gratitude to and kinship with them. They open the heart of the world, catalyzing the growth of consciousness, opening a space for us all to be ourselves more. Compared to the way it once was, living authentically is relatively easy these days.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. We really do. It’s not a fucking refrigerator magnet. It’s the goddamned truth.
As I walked through the Munch 150 exhibition here in Norway – the most comprehensive exhibition of Edvard Munch’s work that’s ever been – I felt that. I felt into this man, the genius which flowed through him. The intensity of his emotion. The vastness of his soul. And how he just carved into a frozen Norwegian culture with expressions of life lived and unlived, loved and unloved, that are so raw, so fierce, that they shook the entire culture. He was a revolutionary, simply because he found no place in the already established norms of society that was embracing enough to hold that which was inside of him.
It was as if for the first time in my entire life, I understood art. Again, I caught myself weeping, feeling the contours of my heart dissolve, expanding into vastness and the heart of Munch.
And when I read the recent news story about the boat with Somalians and Eritreans sinking off the coast of Italy, it struck me even deeper. One of the survivors had been interviewed. “Where are you headed?” “Norway” “Why?” “Freedom, freedom!”
Yes, I cry all the time these days. Here’s a whole boatload of people – sinking to their wet, aquatic graves. What drove them to risk their lives like that? The faint glimmer of a chance of living here, my home country, the place I take for granted.
My home country, which only a century ago was a developing country. My great grandfather (and even my grandfather once) would take his little boat and row for weeks from North of Norway to the great fishing in Lofoten. Sometimes he would arrive there and realize that there was not a lot of fish that year. Droves of men died that way – rowing their simple boats through stormy waters for weeks on end, without any guarantee of a reward.
And on their return, abject tragedy sometimes awaited. The mothers hadn’t the time to both work and watch the children. My mother tells me of the family in the village where two kids fell into a large boiling kettle in a barn while playing. They died there, screaming in boiling water, while the mother was doing manual labour elsewhere. This is Norway just a few generations back.
As I feel my heart burst with these insights, another thing happens. A deep fierceness starts building in me. I get fierce towards complaints, towards petty squabbles, towards people of privilege who are unhappy because of things trivial! I get fierce with religious bigots, holier than thou on the outside, depraved and ugly on the inside. I get fierce with selfishness, ethnocentricity, with people who equate violence with courage. Fuck it all!
Staring into the face of the biggest plate of abundant-fucking-perfection that any people has experienced in the entire history of this species, this planet, how the FUCK do we manage to not appreciate it! It makes my blood boil.
We feel this beauty with isms and pissms and complain complain complain about I’m not getting this I’m not getting that, waa waa waa waa. Shut the fuck up! Perfection is staring you in the face and your fucking annoying, infantile complaining is shitting on the miracle that you are surrounded with! You are so FUCKING UNGRATEFUL!
That’s what’s starting to happen inside of me at times these days. And I feel the love in there. It’s not a rejection of the people. It’s an embrace. It’s being a stand for something greater. I believe the Buddhists have a word for it.
It scares me. My little ego cringes at the thought of standing for this out in the world. Even writing it here is pushing it. My little ego which craves likes on Facebooks and that jumps a little every time my mobile phone makes a sound, fearing it will be something bad, hoping it will be something good, that’s part of this story too. It makes things more complicated..
I sit with people and am afraid they will reject me, simply because the thoughts I have are so revolutionary. I dare not lead, because what I feel is so out of the box. I’m afraid that my intensity will scare them. For the first time in my life, a person has told me to my face that he thinks I’m crazy and actually meant it. Large amounts of people are coming out and telling me that they are a little afraid of me. And I feel almost nauseous when intuiting that this will happen on a wide scale sometime in the future.
Such a fragile little thing my ego. How can it handle an authentic life? How can it allow leadership? Fearing rejection, how can it allow penetrating the culture like Munch once did? How can we all – for I hope you are in on this – change the world by expressing what be believe in fully?
We’ll see.
But a few things are clear:
- Everything in my life that is painful is at its core about wanting to get something
- Everything in my life that is truly joyful is at its core about actually giving something
- I need other people around me – I can’t do shit on my own
- Whatever the path is, it involves both men and women
- I’m very happy I’m moving temporarily to the US in just over a week
- I will have to pray and meditate like a motherfucker