Distress
_I: Speaking of the importance of going inward, when I immerse myself in myself, I find only one great emotion that encompasses my entire inner being, perhaps the one that most defines my internal world, enveloping my essence, and that is Anguish. Defining what it feels like is strange, because it comes from many emotions, which I cannot relate to each other. Sometimes it invades my entire being, causing me to fall into a crushing depression that can last a day or a week.
_AM: What do you feel during that time?
_I: As if I were out of breath, I can't move my body, and everything loses meaning, it becomes cloudy, nothing is clear. It's like looking outside without seeing what's there, with a lost gaze. Desire is lost in every sense, the sensation is like immersing yourself in pain without logic, without reason. Sometimes I try to understand the origin, and yet, there is none. What is Anguish?
_AM: First of all, Angst comes from the Indo-European word “angh,” which means “tight.” Etymologically, it describes the fact that more than one thing is tied and pressed against the others, becoming controlled, narrow. Imagine, then, sadness, melancholy, anger, rage, love, euphoria, pleasure, joy, all of them moving through your body, being trapped, tied by a rope, and pressed against each other. None of them can move, they just remain still, static. If the energy does not move, everything that previously moved you ends in silence, generating a feeling of existential emptiness, since existence is movement. Thus, anguish surrounds the essence, since it is the last negative emotion that you find on the edge of neutrality.
_I: So anguish, unlike melancholy and sadness, does not have a reason for being, it does not have an object of reference, but it is the sensation that occurs when all the others come together at the limit of existence, when returning to the center... This explains why people experience a distressing nonsense that we cannot relate to anything when we approach the truth of our being. It's like nothing makes sense, not love, not struggle, not purpose, not sharing, nothing. Everything becomes irrelevant, and in a second you can feel all the emotions of your life, without leaving a single one out, but they all have that same color, that same aroma, the anguish.
_AM: Do you know the astronaut syndrome?
_I: Tell me?
_AM: Solipsism. It comes from the Latin “solus” (to be alone) and “ipse” (oneself). The syndrome speaks of a person who distances himself so much from the reality in which he lives that he tends to believe that nothing exists but himself. That everything is a dream, that everything he sees only exists in the mind. Astronauts, cosmonauts, are the ones who most present this psychological pathology, because by seeing the Earth from outside, being able to feel the empty space around them, and living the experience that all the things they know are only in a small sphere, it takes for the person to consider that perhaps nothing exists, that everything is a dream, because where he lives there is no time or space. This envelops the person in a distressing depression of unmanageable loneliness, which distances them from other individuals, from normal life on Earth, making them solitary, hermits, denying all contact with reality.
_I: It sounds to me like what we have talked about when we discussed going inward, to the mind, which is one...
_AM: Exactly. Solipsism is experienced by those who go very far away, into space, or by those who go very close, within the soul. "As above, so below". The law of Correspondence will remind us that going towards the Moon or Mars brings us the same sensations as going towards our Heart. For in both directions we approach totality, where time and space lose meaning. And therefore, everything that inhabits them will also lose it.
_I: There stops being logic, because you enter into illogic. There is no point of reference anymore, only I and my perception of things exist.
_AM: Anguish is the last emotion that is felt from the human world when touching the great black hole of the essence, of the I Am.
_I: But when we say that something causes us anxiety, like seeing hunger in the world, or a war, or something that produces disgust, people use anxiety to refer to an indefinite state of discomfort, discomfort, sadness.
_AM: That's something else. It's not Anguish. Anguish is like the thin layer that separates the spiraling chaos of the hurricane from the peaceful stillness of the eye of the storm. Anxiety has no direction, no purpose, no logic; It has no object on which to project itself. A war does not produce anguish, anguish can only be experienced by those who have survived the war, who, without already thinking about the war, cannot look to the future or the past, they cannot perceive a specific emotion, since they have lost all of them. Whoever looks at a war or something disgusting only feels aversion, sadness, anger, discomfort, but not anguish. Anguish does not have a focus of attention.
_I: And how would you define the anguish that remembering the past causes me?
_AM: Melancholy. From the Greek “Melas” (black) and “Kholis” (bile), it represents that visceral emotion that makes you see everything black, that prevents you from seeing ahead, and you can only feel inside. Melancholy is related to the emotions linked to the ancestral and visceral, to the ties that still weigh because you have not been able to get rid of them, which is why they return in the form of vomit, something unprocessed, untranscended.
_I: 2010 was the first time I came to Egypt, I needed to be here, I wanted it with all my might. My guides warned me not to come, they said I was not prepared to face the current reality. But I didn't follow their advice and came. I cried every day, and it was one of the worst trips of my life. I had fever, diarrhea, vomiting. Every place I went awakened pain in me, memories. I thought that the past gave me anguish, but now I understand that no, that it was melancholy, sadness. For years, through my memories, I felt these emotions in me, that idea of “every time in the past was better.” I realize that I could not digest my current reality, I could not process in my stomach what my eyes saw today, because what I lived no longer existed. Melancholy made me sick from a very young age, leading me to constant emotional depression. Every person I remembered, country I felt, they all had something that I had not yet finished digesting. “Black Bile.” But every so often, when I connected with the Universe, with the interdimensional memory, the emotion was different, there was nothing, there were no sensations, there was no one to cry for. I tried to look in other dimensions for the same things I could feel here: longing for someone, loving someone I had had to leave, feeling anger for some enemy from another dimension, or attachment to some entity... And yet, the closer I got to the memory of the cosmos, the fewer emotions I felt, the fewer beings existed there to be longed for. There was no attachment, there was no emotion. And the feeling stopped being melancholic, because there was nothing to process, faces, kisses, caresses, laughter, nothing, I only felt pulses, and they all led me. Then I felt it for the first time...
_AM: …The Anguish…
_I: …the Anguish… There it was, the moment I remembered that I was Everything, that Everything was Me… “I Am who I Am”, I told myself, it resonated in the Universal Mind, and I felt very alone.
_AM: …Solipsism…
_I: Without feeling any emotion, I was able to perceive that nothing existed other than me and my thoughts, I was able to feel at that moment the great universal oxymoron: the complete void, where all are one and one is millions. And there I felt the greatest anguish of all, knowing that I was everyone, that nothing else existed. Suddenly I even felt fear, but it vanished immediately in the centrifugal force of anguish. Nothing made sense, because my mind was the one assigning meaning.
_AM: The Universe is a polarity that does not arise from two aspects, but from oneself. As you have said, the Universe is an oxymoron, born from the Greek words “Oxys” (stinging) and “Moron” (blunt), therefore, an absurd concept that in itself contains dualities: “deafening silence, eternal instant …”, which reminds you of the sensation of Ouroboros, something without purpose, without end, in which its very duality is a mere perspective from unity. If emotions are pulses of positive and negative energy that move pendulous in the polarized cosmos, then the way to get to the center and unity of things is only through purposeless emotion. What is the universal oxymoron par excellence?
_I: …”A distressing love”…
_AM: When the Universe expands it can only feel love, because love is the emotion that connects everything, that manifests creation towards the external, the positive. But when the separated creation seeks to return to the center, unifying things, it follows the opposite path, towards the integration of the expanded, seeking the interior in the form of a negative. Thus, it uses depressive anxiety to find the center.
_I: So the anguish felt on the spiritual path is a way of knowing that we are unifying all things to find the center of the cosmos... No?
_AM: And in that instant, you see the eye of the hurricane, the peace, the fullness, the harmony, the Love. The culmination of anguish is that moment when you recognize: "If nothing makes sense, because I have given it sense, then the only solution is for me to give it a new meaning again."
_I: …And I become the Creator.
_AM: Like in the waves of vibration, for a wave to advance and expand, it needs moments of low and high frequency, where the waves contract or spread out, creating curves, valleys, and hills that you call concave and convex positions. The concave position of a wave (hill upwards) implies a positive point of expansion, while the convex position (valley downwards) implies a negative depression. The movement of light at high speed is precisely due to this position. If you want to propel light through a straight cable, you will need a great initial impulse force for it to reach the other end, otherwise it will lose momentum, stopping halfway. But in a coiled cable, light, its particles, will regain momentum with each new descent, propelling to the next, increasing its force instead of losing it. Now think, then, that depression has a compelling logic: to aid the expansion of light.
_I: Of course! So, every process of internal crisis, dark night of the soul, anguish, is nothing but the convex curve of the Universe propelling itself to create. That's why many artists are depressive, because in that way they manage to find more richness in the inner world.
_AM: In a world of external productivity, of factories, of fields, of hard work; Depression, anguish and sadness are seen as weaknesses, a loss of strength that is useless for work. This has classified them as mental pathologies, and has made everyone try to avoid them and deny them. Fear of these emotions appears, and this wears down the person. Whoever does not dare to live his inner world in depression cannot find the truth about himself. The fear of falling into that uselessness has turned this process into something long-lasting and meaningless, a trap for the mind... But if you know why it exists, then it becomes useful.
_I: Well, Anguish is the other side of Love. Two emotions that make up the unique force of Creation. The Full Void.
_AM: Next time you feel Anxiety engulfing you, don't run away from it, just remember that it's that strange sensation that occurs in your organs when you approach the descent on a roller coaster, but you know well that after the descent, there's nothing but going up, that at the end of the tunnel, there's always light, because without the darkness surrounding you, you could never identify it shining.
_I: When I feel the anguish of meaninglessness, I will immerse myself in it, with the desire to find myself, with the desire to awaken. It's hard to dive in, I know, like jumping into a cold lake, but in its piercing coldness, is where I find the activation of my expansive inner warmth, the pulse that ignites, the energy that soars. Anxiety then ceases to be my prison to become my catapult towards Love.
_AM: The starry sky you see above you owes itself to the dark night, just as the glow of your soul is visible because of the darkness within you.
_I: I Am the Void in Plenitude.